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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



^W'H-fi^<^^ C2<^<^^:2!Lm^ /t£lc 



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A BOOK OF FACTS. 



Mosaic History of tlie 
Hebrews Analyz^ed. 

ALSO 

Th^e Irresistible Conflict 
in Religion in the Present Day. 

IN TWO PARTS. 
With Quotations from many Eminent Divines. 



By One of the Teople. >^:^^ 



PART FIRST. ti)riT'^^^^ 

^%l? 29 1893 

BALXIMORE, MD., U. S. A., 

1893. 



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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1893, 

by Augustine Ducas Clemens, 

in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 






MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 



CONTENTS— PART ONE. 



Prelude. Introduction. 

Preface : Pessimistic view of the Primitive Hebrew. 

Salutation Chapter i 

Moses in the Dark '* 2 

Jews •* Going it " alone " 3 

History of the Creation " 4 

Deluge Demolished . " 5 

The Massacre of the Midia'nites ...;. ** 6 

Jewish Sabbath " 7 

Mistakes of Moses ^ 8 

Godly Heathen and ungodly Jew " 9 

Moses and the Age of the World " 10 

Who wrote the Old Testament ? " 11 

Dr. Weld " 12 

Professor Harper " 15 

Moses and his God analyzed " 14 

" " " •* continued " 15 

concluded " 16 

Lost ten tribes of Israel — were they white or negro ? ** 17 



PART TWO : 

The Irresistible Conflict in Religion, 

Will contain the following : 

Introduction — Preface — New Departure — Jew vs. Christian — 
Christ the Son of Man— What Tongue did He speak ?— Skeleton Must 
be Buried — Methodist Review — lalmage's Creed — Rev. Dr. Harcourt 
— Decayed Root of the Tree— The Chaplains During the War — Latter 
Day Buddhism — Opinion of a Jewish Rabbi on Christ — Archdeacon 
Farrer— Professor Harper's Lecture— Letter addressed to Dr. Harcourt 
— Is there a Future State of Being ? — Is there a Hell of Fire ? — Letter 
addressed to Cardinal Gibbons — Trial for Heresy — Conduct vs. Belief 
— From the New World — Rev. Mr. Schonfarber — Different Creeds — 
Rationalism: — Men Wanted in the Church— Proverbs — Stephen Girard 
and Johns Hopkins — Sentenced as a Witch 

Parts One and Two will shortly he issued in One Volume. < 



PRELUDE.. 

" Through the harsh noises of our day 
A low, sweet prelude finds its way : 
Through clouds of dust and creeds of fear 
A light is waldng calm and clear." 

THE OBJECT of these writings is not to war with Religion 
or Creeds, but simply to inquire and search if we are pursuing 
and practising such a theory as to enlist the thoughts and con- 
fidence of the masses of the human family. We think it is 
evident that only about one-tenth of the Christian world are 
practical Cliristians : we, therefore, advocate such, a theory in 
Religion as will enlist the minds and thoughts of at least 
nine-tenths of the Christian community ; and this may be 
possible if we throw aside all the ojd theories and practices and 
adopt new ones. The Rev. Mr. Talmage says, '^ Throw the 
whole of the old theories overboard and adopt new ones ;^' he 
further says that he could recommend a more acceptable 
Creed than the one we are now practising. 

The real trouble is that the Teachers of the present day are 
afraid to break away from the Divinity that the Bible is sup- 
posed to contain ; they do not want to jeopardize their self- 
interest. It is not the welfare of the human family that they 
are looking after, but it is self, and self only ; and the people 
see and understand this matter and therefore keep aloof from 
this divine class of teachers, and the consequence is that this 
divinity can only command a corporal guard, when with a 
reasonable theory in divine matters they might command 
almost the whole of the intelligent classes of the world. 

Religion and divinity are innate feelings in the human 
breast, and, as far back in the world's history as the human 

(i) 



U PKELUDE. 

mind can reach, every Nation and people bad a Keligion ; it 
always was so and it always will be so. A people without a 
Religion are next to brutes ; there can be no self government 
or safeguard without a religion ; but the people do not want 
an impossible theory presented to them, and to be told that 
they must believe it or be damned : — just, for instance, as 
Moses did at Mouut Sinai when he fixed up a dummy all 
dressed in jewels and presented it to the Hebrews as being the 
great Creator, God Almighty ! These people, notwithstanding 
they were ignorant slaves, did not believe liim, and he was de- 
posed from power and Joshua took his place. There is a point 
at which endurance ceases to be a virtue ; and the people of 
the present age are arriving at that point. There is no use 
for the teachers to try to browbeat and bully the people as 
they did in olden times when they could burn them at the 
stake for their opinions : but those days are past never to re- 
turn ; the people are up in arms on this subject, and they are 
bound to conquer ; and, when they succeed, they will not burn 
the teachers, but, unlike the former clergy, will simply relegate 
them to silent obscurity and appoint others who will have their 
confidence and respect, and who will instruct them in such a 
manner as to be a real benefit to them and the community at 
large, and who, also, will not work upon their credulity and 
cowardice so as to keep them under their control ani extort 
money from them to which they are not entitled — looking very 
much like receiving money under false pretenses ! We there- 
fore* say to the teachers, take heed or suffer the consequences. 



INTRODUCTION. 

. ^T IS SAID that '' History repeats itself/' also that '' There 
is nothing new under the sun :'' of both of these assertions we 
have evidence of their truthfulness throughout the whole of our 
experience in this life. Some think that as ages progress we 
advance in the knowledge of the true science in religious mat- 
ters, but such is not the fact : for we are just as much in the 
dark in respect to spiritual or divine matters in the present 
day, as the human family was in the far past ages. We worship 
unseen Gods, the father and son ; the heathen did the same. 
They had a multiplicity of Gods, we have the same — the only 
difference ts that some call them Saints. 

As far back as our knowledge goes the people were just as 
wise in regard to the Great Creator as we are : the Ancients 
built temples to their Gods, thinking that their spiritual pre- 
sence would occupy them ; we do the same. We look with con- 
tempt upon the former ages, and call them heathen ; but this 
is egotism on our part, for we are following in their footsteps. 
There never was one scintilla of evidence in regard to the 
Great Creator transmitted to us that was, or is, beyond a per- 
ad venture ; we are just as much in the dark in regard to God 
the Great Creator as the people were in former ages. We are 
referred to the Bible as additional evidence to us in regard to 
God and divine matters, but this book is only paper and 
printers' ink, giving a compilation of human thoughts and 
ideas ; therefore, this is no real evidence of these facts. If 
the Bible is*the word of God, and inspired by the Great Ruler 
of the Universe, there would be no need of teachers to explain 
it, for every word in it would explain itself, and every letter 
would be as refulgent as a diamond set in a jewel, and would 
reach our hearts and conscience like a flash of lightning ! — 

(iii) 



IV INTRODUCTION. 

how vain in poor weak humanity pretending to explain the 
word of God ! The little ants, crawling on the ground, know 
just as much in regard to God as we do ; they enjoy God's 
sunshine just as we do ; they procure their food from the 
earth and build themselves houses just as we do ; we see them 
piling up the grains of sand all around their houses, this is 
some of their wealth ; if, unhappily, an accident happens to 
them and they escape with their lives, they have to take a fresh 
start in the world just the same as man has to do. We are all 
just as liable to the vicissitudes of life as the little ants ; in 
fact, we know nothing more than they do of anything beyond 
the face of the earth. 

The heathen and pagans had their form of worship that in- 
culcated virtue ; they also believed that the Gods would punish 
sin : this is just wliat we believe under a different name. The 
Greeks, one thousand years before the birth of Christ, believed 
in the immortality of the soul : we are only copying after them. 
With all our vain pomp and supposed progress we have not 
advanced one hair-breadth in the real knowledge of God — as 
to tvhat God is, or luhere God is, and, like the little ants, we 
have to be satisfied in the enjoyment of what has been provided 
for us ; then why arrogate to ourselves any superior knowledge 
of God the Great Creator than the rest of God's creation ? 
We have more intellect and knowledge of things appertaining 
to this world and nothing more. If we analyze all the sacred 
writings, as far as they relate to God our Great Creator, they 
are all comparatively weak and vain assumption on our part. 
Man knows and feels his weakness ; he therefore tries to raise 
himself up nearer to his God by assuming a knowledge for 
which there is no real evidence or foundation. 

Moses was the first man to hand down to us some of this 
spurious information. He also tried to make himself a God, 
and was to some extent successful, for he is still worshipped 
by many after more than three thou-sand years of "history ; he 
knew that to be a God required great secretiveness ; he there- 
fore practised this theory all of his life except three years, 
which time only we have him in view. After Moses came 
Joshua, another God, for he savs that he caused the Sun to 



IKTRODUCTION^. V 

stand still ; and, as we think none but a God could do this, he 
therefore must have been one of the Luminaries : if any one 
doubts this, we refer them to " Brother Jasper," of Virginia, 
who says that ^'de San do move/' After Joshua, the Judges 
took possession ; and, being under the influence of the 
priests and the Levites, their power only extended to the im- 
mediate surroundings of the Ark of the Covenant, so called. 

From the time that the Jews left Mount Sinai until they got 
to the river Jordan there is very little said about their God ; 
he seems to have deserted them in disgust, for he found out 
then and there, what we are just trying to instill into the 
peoples' minds, that the Jews, instead of being a godly people, 
were more like the imps from Hell (if there is such a place) 
than the people of God. The God of the Hebrews, therefore, 
abandoned them to go on their own hook, which they did with 
a beelzebub for their leader ; for we are indebted to the priests 
and Levites for all that we hear of their God after this time, 
for they kept up their organization and religious rites and tried 
to make the other tribes support them. But it was a very pre- 
carious support, for there was no organized government among 
the twelve tribes ; each tribe only looked out for itself, and so 
it continued until the days of Samuel, to whom the Jews 
are indebted for their first two kings. Had it not been for 
these self-constituted messengers we would never have heard of 
the God of the Hebrews : liow awful that would be for us poor 
heathen ! — we would now be in the dark in regard to divine 
matters, and perhaps be roaming about as uncivilized savages ! 
How grateful we ought to be to the Moses and the prophets, 
and to the whole Jewish nation for having instituted a God 
whom we have taken the privilege of worshipping. 

Samuel, seeing the condition of his people, who were being 
conquered by the heathen — for their God had forsaken them — 
made Saul king; but Saul proved to be too much of a king 
for the priests and the Levites, therefore they determined to 
let him be killed, and they put David in his place, he being a 
man after God's own heart — or, rather, that of the priests and 
Levites. They allowed him to flourish, for they had it in their 
power to make a king or to un-make him if he opposed their 



VI INTRODUCTIOiir. 

prerogatives. David, they say, was a great warrior ; he con- 
quered all the surrounding nations and robbed them of all their 
wealth. When David died he left all this ill-gotten wealth to 
Solomon, his son ; and, to show what a sinful old wretch he 
was, he charged his son to not let the hoary heads of some of 
his people go down to the grave in peace — showing that his 
sinful passions were strong in death. When he was conquering 
the Nations around his Ooantry, some of the prisoners tjiat he 
took he had cut in two with saws. Uriah, one of his generals, 
had a beautiful wife ; David had him killed, but first debauched 
her. This woman was the mother of Solomon. This was the 
god-like David, whose supposed Psalms are still sung as paeans 
to heaven, and he is classed among those who are gone to glory 
and stand in the presence of God ! 

When David first started out in life, before the death of 
Saul, he was in the habit of going out on a still hunt for peace- 
able Philistines ; every one he killed he would cut oif their 
foreskins and hang them to his girdle — just the same as our 
Indians did the scalps in former times. Next came Solomon, 
who commenced his reign with a flourish of trumpets and de- 
votion to his God. He had a great amount of wealth that his 
father had robbed from all the surrounding Nations ; he made 
a great splurge in building a house to his God with this ill- 
gotten wealth ; and every stone in this Temple cost the lives 
of hundreds of helpless beings, who were better in the sight of 
our God than the thieving Jew. 

We do not object to the Temple being the House of the God 
of the Hebrews, but we do protest against our people taking up 
this God, as the God that we now worship. We build Temples 
to our God, but we do not procure the money by murder and 
rapine ; we do not send out cut-throats to murder innocent 
women and children and their fathers and take their accumu- 
lations to build our churches : therefore there is no affinity 
between the Jewish divine writings and the present civilization 
— they should, therefore, be ignored by all true worshippers 
of our Great God the Creator and Benefactor of all mankind. 

Solomon has the credit of great wisdom, and of having 
written three thousand proverbs. A man with one thousand 



INTRODUCTIOIff. Vii 

women as wives and concubines to attend to could not have 
much brain left to write proverbs or anything else, fcjolomon 
was succeeded by one of his sons, and if we wanted an evidence 
of ungodliness in David or his descendant, we could point to 
him as a shining Light in that respect, and a worthy represent- 
ative of Moses and all those who followed him. 

After this tyrant, who caused the disruption of the Nation, 
came a long line of kings who were only notable for being un- 
godly and worshippers 'of strange gods. We are not finding 
fault with them for that, for we think that any other god was 
better than the Hebrews' God. The Jews were not particular 
what God they worshipped, if it only was a cheap god. The 
God that Moses had introduced to them had too large sur- 
roundings ; the whole tribe of Levi had to be supported in the 
worship of this God, and that is what caused all the trouble. 
The priests and the Levites would send out chosen men from 
among themselves to preach and warn the Jews of coming 
trouble if they did not pay their taxes. These men were called 
prophets ; they were constantly prophesying punishment to 
the Nation if it did not turn to their God and forsake all 
others ; and as this God of the Hebrews had a retinue of more 
than twenty thousand to be supported, the Jews naturally went 
for the cheap god. 

One class of our teachers tell us to ^' Search the Scriptures;'^ 
another class (viz. the Church of Rome) discourages the prac- 
tice. Now, the question to us is, Which is right ? For, if we 
search the Scriptures, we become confused ; if we do not, 
ignorance in our own spiritual affairs is the result : and it 
may be in this case that ignorance is bliss, for the Scriptures 
were not written for that purpose. They are — we allude to 
the Jewish Scriptures — nothing more than a conglomeration 
of human thoughts emanating from a people of very narrow 
views and selfish and bigoted minds : — to some, they are a very 
great mystery ; to others, this mystery consists of nothing 
more than concentrated ignorance. 

The teachers have been searching for a long time with a very 
unsatisfying result both to themselves and to their dependents. 
The reason for this is that they look upon those ignorant Jew. 



Vlll INTEODUCTIOK. 

ish writings as the foundation of the Christian Creed ; there- 
fore, they are afraid of throwing all things mundane into 
chaos — they do not take into consideration the intelligence of 
the near twentieth century. 

If these Jewish Scriptures were of Divine origin there would 
be no use in searching, for every word would be as plain as 
the noon-day Sun. Our great Creator does speak to us every 
day and every hour. When our bodies need attending to, 
God not only tells us what we need, but famishes the needful. 
These are God's words, and for this benefaction we should 
never cease to praise and return thanks ; and these are the 
only words that God, our great Creator, has ever vouchsafed 
to any of His creatures. 

When reading these Books of the Old Testament we natur- 
ally conclude that they were written by those indicated, and at 
the time they indicate ; but such is not the fact, for none of 
these Books were written until several hundred years after the 
time they refer to. In the first place, there is no evidence of 
Moses having written any of the Pentateuch (except the Ten 
Commandments) ; the presumption is that he wrote up to 
Exodus while in the Laud of Midian. The balance of these 
Books were not written until the Jewish Nation had almost 
ended their existence. 

When David became king, the Jews had been in the Land 
of Canaan five hundred years ; up to that time there was not 
a particle of evidence of written history, and David and Solo-v 
mon were the first to appoint Scribes for that purpose. The 
first prophet to write his own utterances was Isaiah, which was 
about two hundred years after the time of Solomon : and the 
question naturally occurs. How did they preserve these Laws 
and utterances during this long lapse of time? It was done 
in this way : men were instructed in the laws and the history 
of the nation ; they repeated these orally on certain occasions, 
and it was handed down from generation to generation, from 
mouth to mouth. This is what is called tradition ; and during 
all of this long period of time in which these said-to-be Divine 
ordinances were being bandied from mouth to mouth the lan- 
guage of the Jewish Nation changed again and again : — in 



INTRODUCTION". IX 

Egypt., tliey spoke tlie lan^^nage of their masters ; in Canjian, 
they adopted the tongue of the inhabitants of that land, which 
was Phoenician, and the Aramaic hinguage gradually crept in 
among them afterwards ; and, finally, the Greek language was 
the language of the Country. It is a well-known fact that 
what is called the Hebrew was a dead language long before the* 
Christian Era. 

At the time of the Advent of Christ, the Aramaic and the 
Greek languages were the universal languages of the Jewish 
Nation ; and there was not much written history of the Jews 
until the days of Ezra, which was about four hundred years 
before the Christian Era and more than one thousand years 
from the days of Mo>es, and this history was added to and re- 
vised two or three hundred years after this time. 'J'he proba- 
bilities are that up to the time of Samuel, the Prophet, there 
were but few men in the whole of the Jewish Nation who could 
write ; and even the Book of Samuel is supposed to have been 
written during the time of Solomon ; and these ignorant, sin- 
ful men are supposed to have handed down the word of God, 
by the word of mouth, during the long period of seven 
hundred years ! 

Now, the serious question is asked again, how any intelligent 
set of men can have the hardihood to present to their fellow 
beings a lot of trashy writings as being of a sacred and Divine 
character, that were held in abeyance for this long period of 
time, with nothing of a written character to vouch for them — 
nothing but Jewish tradition ! It is something that surpasses 
the credulity, and the incredulity, of the human race. 



PREFACE. 

PESSIMIST VIEW OF THE PRIMITIVE HEBREWS. 

WE WILL take a view of the so-called people of God, to 
judge for ourselves how much truth there is in what Moses 
claims for them. In the first place, Adam, from whom they 
claim their descent, was a sinner, and was driven from the 
garden of Eden for his disobedience to his Grod. Cain, the 
first child born to them, wag a murderer, and a mark was put 
upon him. Lamech, another descendant, confessed to having 
killed a man to his hurt. Ham, the son of Noah, did some- 
thing wicked, for which his father cursed him and all his pds- 
terity. Abraham, the first real Jew, married his sister and 
cohabited with all the female servants in his house or tent. 
Jacob married his two cousins and cohabited Vith their two 
maids, by all of whom lie became the father of twelve sons who 
are called the patriarchs : four of these were bastards, and 
they are the ones who tried to kill Joseph, but finally deter- 
mined to sell him into slavery. Reuben, the oldest son, de- 
bauched his father's concubine and lost his birthright. Judah, 
the m)st prominent one, cohabited with his son's widow and 
got her with cliild who was Pharez, one of the genealogy by 
which the Jewish stream is handed down to Moses and Aaron: 
Simon and Levi, their father says, were instruments of cruelty. 

Jacob, wh) is said to have been one hundred and twenty 
years of age, and all his sons, were taken to Egypt, where they 
remained for 215 years, and during all of that time, notwith- 
standing Moses was among them for forty years, he does not 
give one sentence of their history, nor of his own. Thejj; were 
all in the dark, and Moses was ashamed to throw any light 

(X) 



1 



PREFACE. XI 

upon them to sliow how they lived there. Moses' father mar- 
ried his father's sister, a degree forbidden by Moses in his 
laws : tlierefore, Moses, Aaron and Miriam were conceived in 
sin. If Moses could not write the history of the Jews in 
Egypt, how could he write the history of Abraham, Isaac and 
Jacob? There is every reason to think that the Jews kept no 
record of their history ; therefore, we must infer that the his- 
tory was manufactured by Moses, and that all the history 
previous to Exodus is a myth, the emanation of the fertile 
brain of Moses, written while he was in the Land of Midian 
concocting plans to form a new Nation of which to make him- 
self Ruler. 

There is no doubt that the Jews were captives in Egypt, but 
how they got there is another question. We do not believe 
what Moses says about that or anything else. One great prob- 
ability is that they were taken there just as Joseph was, and 
that they knew nothing about the worship of God until Moses 
tried to instruct them. They were idolators of the most pro- 
nounced kind. There is no evidence of their having ceremo- 
nies of a religious character, or of a Sabbath, or of circumci- 
sion. According to the Laws promulgated by Moses, the con- 
stant iteration and reiteration of his threats and commands 
prove that the Jews must have been the lowest specimens of 
the human family. They were steeped in filth and all kinds 
of sins that the Laws of Moses call their attention to. 

The first account that we have of these so-called people of 
God, is where Moses says they borrowed all the jewels and val- 
uables they could from the Egyptians ; but as we know that 
they were ostraci^^ed by these people, it is not probable they 
would lend them any of their valuables : therefore, they must 
have done as they were in the habit of doing afterwards. They 
robbed and plundered the Egyptians of all they could lay their 
hands on, and it was for this they were pursued by Pharaoh 
and his army. The Egyptians were glad to get rid of them, 
just as the South would be glad to get rid of the negroes of the 
present day : it was the plunder they wanted to recover. Erom 
the history of the Jews as given to us we get a great many lies, 
and but a few truths. 



XU PREFACE. 

The Jews left in the night : that is the way all thieves do ; 
and, knowing they would be pursued, they set a trap for their 
pursuers, the result of which was successful, no doubt, beyond 
their most sanguine expectations. When they got beyond the 
Red Sea, they spread themselves out looking for plunder ; not, 
as Moses would have us believe, that they were innocent pil- 
grims on a pilgrimage to the mount of God, with an angel and 
a pillar of fire leading them, but, like a pack of wolves and 
buzzards scenting prey from afar, they traveled along the shores 
of the Red Sea for about four hundred miles. All this was a 
good and fertile country, and there is not a doubt but that 
they were murdering and plundering all the inhabitantg, when 
the whole country was aroused to defend themselves against 
the robbers, bandits, thieves and freebooters — and here is 
where Moses gives an account of the first battle, but he does 
not tell us what the battle was for. They were finally gotten 
to the place to which Moses had planned to bring them, and 
they were kept there by the efforts of Moses and his arniy of 
Levites, who were about twenty thousand strong and well 
armed, for about eighteen months : but they were very restless 
and wanted blood and plunder, for they had tasted this luxury 
(to them) and desired more. 

Moses happened to absent himself for forty days and they 
took advantage of this to call on Aaron to make them a God 
like they had been in the habit of worshipping. This was what 
Aaron had been accustomed to before the advent of Moses as 
a leader, and he, not having the nerve of his brother, complied, 
but the return of Moses stopped them. He called out his 
Levites and killed about three thousand of the people and 
subdued them for the time being. 

As we have given an extended account of all their doings at 
Mount Sinai and around the desert in another part of these 
writings, and this being only a synopsis of some parts of their 
history, we will leave the so-called people of God and take up 
Moses personally. 

As Moses does not give us much of his history or of his life, 
we will try to bring him out of the dark and see if he was a 
prophet of God, or of the beelzebub of the period. 



PREFACE. Xlll 

Let us take a review of Moses personally and see bow he 
ought to stand in the estimation of the present generation. 
The writings ascribed to him are very vague and mystifying : 
of his personal history and that of the Jews and of the people 
of that period he tells almost nothing. In the first place he 
tells us he was taken out of the river Nile and given to his own 
mother to be nursed, and then he stops and tells nothing more 
for forty years. At the end of that time he reappears and 
murders an Egyptian without provocation ; and the next day 
he went out to kill some more, but, finding that his crime had 
been discovered, he fled to the Land of Midian. There he is 
given one of the priest's daughters as wife or concubine — ■ 
for he does not tell how many wives he had previous to this ; 
and, to judge from his after history, he must have had several. 
Again he disappears from view for forty more years, and all 
we know about him in this second period is that he was m the 
Jjand of Midian, and had charge of the flocks and herds of the 
priest of Midian. 

The reader must not imagine that he was a shepherd ; on 
the contrary, he had charge of all the shepherds and of all the 
wealth of the country. He was a prince or nobleman of the 
Court of Midian ; he had two sons by the wife spoken of, but 
he never has told what became of them. They must have been 
bad boys, just like their father ; and, as not much good could 
be said of any of them, they were ignored. 

Now the question recurs again. What was Moses doirjg in 
the second forty years? From what information we have, and 
that is of the most scanty kind, we think we can safely conclude 
tliat he was writing and planning for his second advent into 
Egypt. 

Moses no doubt wrote the book of Genesis, and here is where 
the planning comes in : for, knowing the condition of the Jews 
in Egypt, and also their bad propensities, he adopted the plan 
of trying to instill into their minds the belief that they were 
descended from a great and godly people, and that Grod, who 
was a greater God than any of the gods whom they had been 
accustomed to worship, was going to take them in His especial 
charge. To prove all this, it was important to write their his- 



XIV PREFACE. 

tory from the commencement : he, therefore, launched out 
into the history of the Creation, and the making of Adam and 
Eve. From them he commenced the genealogy, which he gives 
witliout a break down to his own time, although there are sev- 
eral breaks in the history. There is one period of about six- 
teen hundred years ; and how he gets over this with the gene- 
alogy we cannot imagine. He tells us about the sons of God 
coming down upon Earth and corrupting the daughters of 
men- — females must have been scarce in heaven ! He also tells 
us about the Flood that destroyed all the human family, ex- 
cepting Noah and his faniily, for he says that all flosh had be- 
come corrupt. If this was true, it is a wonder that there was 
not some great catastrophe at this time to destroy the Jews 
instead of the Egyptians ; for we know that the Jews were a 
thousand times more corrupt than the Egyptians were. We 
also know, from recent discoveries, that this account of the 
Flood has been greatly exaggerated and the divine character 
given it to be pure fiction and falsehood. The history of that 
flood was engraved on stone two liundred years before the time 
of Moses ; the evidence of which is in the British Museum in 
London. After writing this Munchausen account of the flood, 
Moses almost skip:5 over four hundred years of history and 
drops on that great imaginary character he calls Abraham, the 
first real Jew, for he tells us that Abraham was circumcised at 
the age of ninety and nine years. From here we date the first 
great misfortune to mankind : previous to this the whole 
human family were heathens. Just think : the world was then 
about two thousand years old, according to Moses, and all 
were heathens — not a Jew to break the monotony ! Adam was 
a heathen, and all the genealogy to N"oah were heathens. 

Noah was a heathen, and all his family ; and all the genea- 
logy to Abraham were heathens, and Abraham was a heathen 
for ninety and nine years ; and he. being then circumcised, 
became a fit companion for God : for Moses tells us that God 
visited the earth with two companions and called on Abraham, 
who entertained him with a fatted calf under a tree in picnic 
style. After they had eaten — and no doubt had some wine to 
drink — they all became talkative, and God told Abraham they 



PREFACE. XV 

were a Committee, of which no doubt his God was the chair- 
man, who were going to see personally if all they had heard 
about Sodom and Gomorrah was true ; and if they were as 
wicked as represented, God said he would destroy them all. 
The electric communication between heaven and earth must 
have been disarranged, as God had to come in person to know 
the truth. 

This was all the plan of Moses— to begin with Adam and 
come down to the first Jew, to show the gentle lamb-like Jews 
what they were descended from. He then sent Jacob with his 
twelve lambs and all their belongings down to Egypt, where 
they must have propagated faster than that number of sheep 
could possibly have done, even if each sheep had lived to the 
age of one hundred years, to make the number of people that 
Moses says there were when they left Egypt. Let us now go 
back to the land of Midian and interview Moses again. We 
left him there writing the history of the Jews. We will first 
peep under the dark envelope and try to see what he is writing 
about the first inhabitants, viz., the Heathen — from whom the 
godlike Jews are descended. 

Moses commences by saying, *^ In the beginning God created 
the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, 
and void ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep : and 
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.^' 

''And God said. Let there be light ; and there was light. 
And God saw the light, that it was good.'' A school-boy 
knows better than this indicates. 

''And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of 
the waters.'' Moses intimates that all was water and that dry 
land was made to appear out of the water. This was improb- 
able, as the earth was rock, and water was an after considera- 
tion. He says that God made the herbs to grow before the 
Sun was made ; he says, God made two great lights, one to 
rule by day and the other by night. He did not know that 
the Sun was always shining on some parts of the earth, but 
thought it was lit up in the morning and put out at night, and 

he had no idea how the Sun got back to the starting-place 

from West to East. And God said, " Let us make man :" 



XVI PREFACE. 

and Grod made man, both mule and female, in his own image 
and likeness. It will be noticed that God had a help-mate in 
the process of making man, just as Adam had. Moses judges 
God from his own stand-point, supposing that God had a 
great many wives. We here call attention to the fact that this 
making of man, both male and female, had no connection with 
the creation of Adam and Eve, for they were an after consi- 
deration, — made to till the soil ; the first were the Sons of 
God, made before the world was finished. 

If we ask how Moses knew all this, we are told it was by 
*^ Inspiration.^^ But we know that inspiration from the Great 
Creator must be truth, and all that Moses has written about 
the matter is nonsense and untruth. Adam and Eve were not 
tlie same as those made on the sixth day : for God said, ^'There 
is no man to till the Earth ;'' and so God made him for that 
purpose. He was not a Son of God, but a laborer. When Eve 
was presented to him, he said, ^' She is bone of my bone and 
flesh of my flesh, therefore shall man leave his father and his 
mother and cleave unto his wife.^^ Adam at this time was 
young and his wife was an infant in age, and what could they 
know of father or mother, if there were no other people in the 
world? They were still innocent and could know nothing of 
procreation, as they had not tasted of the tree of Life. Adam 
called his wife ^' Eve, because she was the Mother of all living.'^ 
What there was living excepting the animals, we are not told. 
When Adam tasted the forbidden fruit and discovered that 
they were naked, God, whom Moses intimates was a tailor, 
made them coats and clothed them. When Cain killed Abel, 
he was cursed by the Lord, and he said to God that every one 
whom he should meet would want to kill him, and God put a 
mark upon him to protect him. Now, if they were the only 
peo[)le in the world, who was there, as Cain feared, to kill him? 
If there were other people, they must have been the Sons of 
God — those who were made on the sixth day — for Moses tells 
us, after this, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of men ; 
that they were fair to look upon, and they took themselves 
wives of all which they chose. Anyone with common percep- 
tion can see that this whole account of the creation is silly 



PREFACE. XVll 

nonsense ; and so is the account of Abraham, Tsaac and Jacob, 
and that of God swearing to do certain things and then repent- 
ing and refusing to keep his oath — making God of less import- 
ance than an ordinary man. 

There is no evidence whatever to sustain the history of the 
Jews as written by Moses up to the time of the Exodus from 
Egypt : they knew nothing of God the Great Creator, nor of 
circumcision or any religious ceremonies except Idolatry ; they 
lived more like animals than human beings, and when they left 
Egypt they acted still more like hyenas and wolves. 

We have taken a view of Moses in Midian to try to find 
oat what he was doing in all the forty years he was 
there. We now come to some of his real history. He 
says he led his father-in-law's flock back of the desert to 
the Mount of God. What his object was in taking the 
flocks and herds of cattle three hundred miles through a 
country with little or no pasturage or water, we can only ima- 
gine to be that he did not intend to return them, but to keep 
them for the use of the Jews. Finding large flocks and herds 
to be had for the taking, and knowing the Jews had this pro- 
pensity, he changed his mind and returned them. He then 
asked the Priest for permission to return to his own country, 
which was readily granted. He took his wife and two sons, 
put them on mules and started for Egypt. Before this, how- 
ever, he tells us that he met his God on Mount Sinai, and 
formed an alliance with Him to deliver the Jews from bondage. 
On his way to Egypt, to carry out the plans that had been 
agreed upon, he stopped at an inn for refreshments, and he 
says he met his God again, and it seems there must have been 
some disagreement between him and his God, which termin- 
ated in a fight in which his God tried to kill him but did not 
succeed. Moses had the best of it and got no blessing, as in 
the case of Jacob who would not let up on his God without a 
blessing. Moses hints that the cause of the quarrel was that 
he had not circumcised his sons, an operation which he says 
was afterward performed by his wife, notwithstanding the 
children must have been over thirty years of age. We ask our 
readers to open their Bibles and read all this trash, and if they 
B 



XVlll PREFACE. 

can think there is anything divine in it they are welcome to 
their thoughts. 

When Moses got near to Egypt he met his brother Aaron, 
with whom no doubt he had been in communication, and they 
completed their plans of procedure. They first got the con- 
sent of the Jews and then they called on Pharaoh, who, they 
say, flatly refused their request, which was, to go into the wil- 
derness three day^s journey to worship the God of the Hebrews. 
Particular attention is called to this : it was not the God of 
the Universe they wanted to worship, but the God of the He- 
brews. Here is another evidence of the untruthfulness of 
Moses : he only asked for a three day's journey, intimating 
that they would then return — which he did not intend" to do. 
He tlien says that he and his God brought a great many plagues 
on Egypt, all of which is fiction, as an evidence of which we 
will narrate the account of one of them. He says he brought 
on a plague of murrain, which killed all the horses and cattle 
in the whole of Egypt ; again, he filled all the cattle and horses 
with boils ; after that he again killed all the cattle and horses 
that were in the fields with hail ; and then, again, he slew all 
the first born of human kind and of cattle and horses ; and, 
then, to cap the climax, he destroyed all of Pharaoh's army of 
horses and chariots ! Comment is unnecessary on such un- 
reasonable history. Another Munchausen tale to which we 
wish to call attention is this : he tells us that, previous to his 
birth, Pharaoh gave orders to kill all the male children of the 
Jewish population ; he was only saved by. a miracle, and as 
there is no evidence that this order was ever countermanded, 
how could there be six hundred thousand men between the 
ages of twenty and fifty y^ars only eighty years after his birth ? 
We leave the reader to analyze this wonderful claim. We will 
tell all about the Red Sea miracle : how he crossed over with 
about four million souls, and all the herds, flocks and cattle, 
of which he says there were very many, and all the belongings 
appertaining to this population, all crossed over in one night ! 
Anyone knows that it would take at least ten days and nights 
for all this to pass any given point. 

Moses has now gotten to the opposite bank of the Eed Sea 



PREFACE. XIX 

with his horde of slaves and savages. He now straightened 
himself up and tried to assume the role of Kuler, Prince or 
King, but he was a little too previous in this assumption, for 
the people he had to deal with were not ready for anything of 
the kind : like wild beasts, they scented their prey from af ar ; 
they were free now, and declined to ent^r into another kind of 
slavery ; they wanted to enjoy their freedom by plundering all 
the nations around and about the Desert, which they finally 
did. The first thing Moses did when he got on the banks of 
the Red Sea was to issue some of those laws that he had written 
in the Land of*Midian; levying heavy taxes on the eleven 
tribes of the Jews to support his Court, the Priests aiid the 
tribe of Levi. All the first-born of the children were to be 
redeemed, and all the firstlings of the cattle were for the priests 
and Levites. He also established human slavery, not only of 
the captives, but his own people also. He intended to estab- 
lish a great Autocratic Monarchy, and therefore needed slaves. 
He finally got the Jews to Mount Sinai, after clearing out all 
the inhabitants up to that point ; and there he tried, by all 
the powers he could bring to bear, to turn or semi-civilize this 
horde of unruly Jews, all to no effect. They broke from him 
there, and, having made Joshua their leader, started on a 
round of murder and plunder for thirty-eight years, until they 
got to tlie land of Edom. [n all thepe thirty-eight years we 
are in utter darkness as to their doings ; we know they had 
been doing something very bad or Moses would have given an 
account of that tjme. When the Jews left Egyyt they could 
have gone to the Land of Canaan by a short route, but that did 
not suit the plans^of Moses. He wanted to organize them for 
his own selfish purposes : he therefore took them to Mount 
Sinai, where he had made previous arrangements, but he did 
not succeed in carrying out his plans, for the Jews became un- 
ruly and would have left him there, but for some reason best 
known to himself he followed them instead of leading them — 
they literally dragged him around the desert. As an evidence 
of this fact, and that he had no control over them, and the 
mortification he endured, and the bitterness of spirit that he 
was laboring under when they got to the neighborhood of the 



XX PREFACE. 

river Jordan, read what he sajs in the latter part of the Book 
of Deuteronomy. Moses wrote a song the same day, and taught 
it to the people, the Children of Israel. 

He [Moses] gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said, 
*' Be strong and of a good courage : for thou shalt bring the 
children of Israel into the land which I [Moses] sware unto 
them : and I [Moses] will be with thee. And it came to pass, 
when Moses had made an end of writing the words of the law 
in a book, until they were finished. That Moses commanded 
the Levites which bare the Ark of the covenant of the Lord, 
saying. Take this book of the law, and put it in the side of the 
ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there 
as a witness against thee. For I know thy rebellion, and thy 
stiff neck : behold, while I am yet alive with you this day, ye 
have*been rebellious against the Lord ; and how much more 
after my death? Gather unto me all the elders of your tribes, 
and your officers, that I may speak these words into their ears, 
and call heaven and earth to record against them. For I know 
that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn 
aside from the way which I commanded you. 

^* Do ye thus requite the Lord, foolish people and unwise? 
Is not he thy father that hath bought thee ? hath he not made 
thee, and esvtablished thee ? Eemember the days of old. When 
the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when 
he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people 
according to the number of the children of Israel. 

** But Jeshurun waxed fat, and k'icked : thou art covered 
with fatness ; then he forsook God. They sacrificed unto 
devils, not to God ; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods 
that came newly up. 

*^ And when the Lord [Moses] saw it, he abhorred them, be- 
cause of the provoking of his sons, and of his daughters. For 
a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest 
hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on 
fire the foundations of the mountains. They shall be burnt 
with hunger, and devoured with burning heat, and with bitter 
destruction : 

^' I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the 



PREFACE. XXI 

poison of serpents of the dust. I said, I would scatter them 
into corners, I would make the remembrance of them to cease 
from among men ; were it not that / feared the wrath of the 
enemy, lest their adversaries should say. Our hand is high, and 
the Lord hath not done all this. For they are a nation void 
of counsel, neither is there any understanding in them. For 
their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomor- 
rah : their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter : 
Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of 
asps. 

^' To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense ; their foot 
shall slidein due time : for the day of their calamity is at hand, 
and the things that shall come upon them make haste. 

** See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me ; 
I kill, and 1 make alive ; I wound, and I heal ; neither is there 
any that can deliver out of my hand. For I [Moses] lift up 
my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. If I whet my 
glittering sword, and my hand take hold on judgment ; I will 
render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that 
hate me. 

'^ I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword 
shall devour flesh ; and that with the blood of the slain and 
of the captives from the beginning oi revenges upon the 
enemy." 

All this venom from Moses proves two things : first, that 
the Jews were idolaters and always had been, and, secondly, 
that Moses had been deposed from power and was not even 
permitted to cross over Jordan. When the Jews reached the 
place where they finally crossed the river Jordan, they were 
still dissatisfied ; they wanted more plunder ; they therefore 
continued up through the land of the Amorites and other na- 
tions, then they turned bacK toward the crossing-place in a 
zigzag direction, so as to more effectually clean the country -of 
people and plunder. 

They left poor Moses in Blount Pisgah, where he died of a 
broken heart or he committed suicide : they left his body and 
bones to rot like a dog. Had he been in good standing with 
the Jews, they would have taken his bones into the Land of 



XXll PREFACE. 

Canaan, as they did those of Joseph, which the}^ brought all 
the way from Egypt. 

Moses was too old for the task he had undertaken, and 
Joshua, being much younger, and not having any of those am- 
bitious ideas that would subject the Jews to almost the same 
condition that they had left in Egypt, was, therefore, selected, 
and he did not disappoint them in their expectations, for he- 
was the chiaf of a set of heartless wretches. 

Moses tells us that they had no time to circumcise the chil- 
dren during their traveling around the wilderness ; this we 
know is a gross untruth, for, according to the evidence we have 
independent of his writings, they only traveled about 1600 
miles during the thirty-eight years, which would only be about 
six day's journey in each year, leaving them the whole of the 
year, except the six days, to camp and raise the whole year's 
crop. He also tells us that his wife, on their way to Egypt, 
performed the operation of circumcision on her son : why, then, 
if the Jew men had no time, could not the women attend to 
it ? The fact is, they were not attending to any divine rites 
during that time ; nor did they attend to anything of the kind 
until the priests and the Levites got the upper hand. 

The whole history of the Jews, from Egypt to Babylon, 
proves that they were confirmed idolators ; the contrary is only, 
demonstrated by the efforts of the Priests and the Levites, and 
they were struggling for their own interests and not the 
worship of God. 

The prophet Samuel was very loth to give the Jews a king, 
for he knew that a king would take all their authority from 
them and curtail the large revenue they were collecting for 
their support from the people. 

The most astonishing fact of the present intelligent age is, 
that the teachers of the Christian creed should insist on pro- 
claiming that the Jewish histories are of Divine origin, or by 
Divine inspiration, when the fact is palpable to any inquiring 
mind who has looked into the subject, that they are all tradi- 
tions ; some written five hundred years after the exodus from 
Egypt, and the greater part written five hundred years after 
the time of David. There is no evidence of any writing up to 



PREFACE. XXlil 

that period, nor is there any evidence that any of these Jews 
could write ; they left Egypt a horde of ignorant, unruly and 
uncultivated people, and remained the same during their whole 
history except during the time of David and Solomon ; it was 
left for Ezra, after the return from Babylon, to codify, revise 
and write these Books, that were received by early pagan Kome 
as of Divine origin, but which were intended by the author to 
be nothing more than Jewish history. It was the Christians 
who made pet lanabs of the Jews, and we all know that they 
are, and always were, predisposed to take all the taffy that is 
offered to them. 

The Jews had no more idea of the golden rule than a hog 
has of a holy-day ; they were egotists of the rankest kind ; 
they always spoke of God as the God of the Jews and of no 
one else ; they were unwilling that anyone else should have any 
interest in their God. 

Moses tells us that the seed of Abraham was to be a blessing 
to all the human family ; we all know what a Jew's blessing 
did consist of. They were a scourge to every people and nation 
with whom they came in contact. 

While the Jews did profess to serve God, they had no moral 
ideas towards any other people. There is one God whom they 
served with the greatest devotion, and that is the Golden God. 
Just show a Jew that god and he forgets everything else in this 
or any other world in his anxiety to secure that god, the 
Almighty Dollar. 



Mosaic History of the Hebrews Analyzed. 

CHAPTER ONE. 

SALUTATIOK. 

TO APPEAR before the public to contradict some of the 
theories that they have been educated to believe as of divine 
origin, is not only a bold, but a very unpleasant, task. Many 
of the people of the present age, and most of those of past 
ages, have accepted the writings of Moses as written by divine 
inspiration : the task that is here undertaken is to try to show 
that, so far from being divine in their nature, they are unfit 
reading for a refined community. 

At the time that Moses made his appearance on the stage of 
this world as a leader, teacher and law-giver, the human family 
were mostly in profound ignorance in regard to the existence 
of a Supreme Being, and in this particular the Jews in Egypt 
were the most conspicuous objects. Moses was an Egyptian 
in every sense, for according to his own account he had been 
adopted by the Royal family of Egypt and educated by them 
in all the highest branches of their lore that the country pos-. 
sessed. These people at that time were far in advance of most 
of the rest of mankind in the Arts and Sciences of the period. 
The higher class of the Egyptian people were supposed to have 
SOME knowledge of a supreme God, and Moses, being one of 
them, no doubt acquired the same knowledge ; but, notwith- 
standing all this, they were idolaters, and Moses must have 
been the same, until he was instructed by the Midianites into 
a more perfect knowledge of what he calls God. Up to this 
time there is not the slightest evidence that the Jews in Egypt 
(25) 



36 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS Aiq"ALYZBD. 

ever heard of their God, or anything other than Idolatry ; for 
Moses, who professes to give so much of their history, does 
not say one word about any forms or ceremonies of a religious 
character performed by them in the land of Egypt. Moses, 
when Tie became a fugitive from justice and fled to the land of 
Midian, there acquired a more perfect view of the Supreme 
Being, and perverted this knowledge to his own self-aggran- 
dizement. He used the name of God just as a rogue does the 
name of a good man, and forges it on a note or any instrument 
of writing to procure wealth and worldly honors. But, with 
all his utmost endeavors, he made very little impression upon 
the people he was trying to defraud, for the people he called 
the children of Israel were so steeped in filth and ignorance 
that they were not equal to the emergency of changing their 
forms of worship in so short a time as Moses desired. The 
writings of Moses may have partly suited the time and people 
that they were intended for ; and more particularly for the 
Jews when they got to the land of Canaan : but for the human 
family of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they are all 
trash, and if presented to us now for the first time as divine 
matter they would be rejected with contempt and scorn, as 
nearly all of them are unfit reading matter for the most ordi- 
nary purpose. 

At the time these writings were incorporated into the 
Christian Bible as its foundation, there was great scarcity of 
religious matter ; and the compilers of the Christian Bible, 
feeling this want of what they considered divine writings, 
adopted the Jewish writings to start their Bible : for the 
forms and ceremonies of the Jews of Jerusalem suited the 
forms and ceremonies of pagan Rome and Greece, more parti- 
cularly the Romans, who were just emerging from paganism, 
and their ideas being a great deal like those of Moses and the 
Jews they were not very particular as to the suitableness of 
these writings so long as they would subserve their own per- 
sonal and selfish purposes. But, in the present age, when the 
people have become intelligent from education, and they have 
the facilities for reading, and enjoy free thought, they see the 
impurity, the unfitness and the untruthfulness of most of 



MOSES WAS A FRAUD. 27 

these writings, and tbej^also see their unfitness to occupy tlie 
position in which they now stand in the Christian Bible. Now 
that the clergy and laity are so much disturbed in regard to 
tbe re-arranging and changing their forms of Theology and 
articles of Faith, if they would take some steps toward the ex- 
punging of these writings from tbe Christian Bible, they would 
be doing more towards the betterment of christian Theology 
than all they are trying to do. All of these writings are very 
unchristian in their requirements, and they and Christianity 
are like oil to water — they cannot mix. The writings of Moses 
are a stumbling block to all well wishers of true Christian 
Religion, for tlie most superficial reader of the present day can 
see their unchristian teaching, and, so far from being divine, 
they are untruthful and unacceptable to a virtuous mind. The 
intention of this book is not to meddle with creed or the con- 
science of any one, but to try to disabuse the minds of all well 
wishers of true religion, and to point to the erroneous reverence 
that they have bestowed on this undeserving portion of the 
Bible. The writer, therefore, asks the indulgence of the reader 
to first read all the evidence that will be shown before forming 
any opinion. The charges that will be made against these 
writings are of a very serious nature, and we hope to be able 
to extract from these writings sufficient evidence of the char- 
acter to sustain the charges ; and hope, farther, to be able to 
convince the unbiassed reader of the unreliability of the whole 
of this conglomerated history of the Jews, so far as the divinity 
of it is concerned. We shall cull from them such passages as 
are available to convict Moses on his own evidence, as there is 
no other evidence in existence. That Moses was a fraud and 
an arch-impostor there can be no doubt to any fair minded 
readers who will divest themselves of all religious bias. We 
do not object to these writings as Jewish history, but the claim 
of their divinity we reject with contempt and scorn, for we feel 
that we know that our God, the Great Creator, is not the weak 
minded monster as presented by Moses as his God, But it 
may be that we are too previous with our charges against 
Moses, for he never claimed for his God as being the God of 
the Universe, but only the God of the Hebrews and the Israel- 



28 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

ites. What we want to draw attention to is the mistake or 
blunder the Church of Rome made in*adopting this God, as 
the Universal God. 

The Jews in Egypt were the most ignorant and debased of 
the human family. They must have been guilty of all the sins 
that the Laws of Moses call attention to ; they must have been 
in amuch lower condition than the negro slaves in this country 
previous to their liberation ; and this was not so much in con- 
sequence of their servitude as the low and vicious habits that 
seemed natural to these people. \ 

The way we get at these facts is by studying the nature of 
the Laws promulgated by Moses. According to these Laws, 
they were murderers, thieves, idolaters, adulterers and every 
other species of sinners that these Laws call attention to : and 
the way we know these facts is, that we know that laws are 
made to repress sin, and not in an4;icipation of it. Moses well 
knew the character of the people he was going to take charge 
of ; he wanted to make himself their King, and framed the 
Laws to suit the occasion. It is by studying these Laws that 
we gain an insight into the shortcomings of the Jews. That 
they were Idolaters of a very low order there can be no doubt, 
and all this trashy history about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is 
a myth, the emanation from the fertile brain of Moses to sub- 
serve his own personal ambition ; he assumes to give the Jew- 
ish history from the creation, but the only part that he could 
give with any certainty was from Exodus to Mount Sinai : 
after they left the Mount he was nothing more than a cypher 
in the Jewish camps. The Jews had no history in Egypt, nor 
anywhere else previous to that time : they were no doubt taken 
to Egypt as slaves and sold just as Joseph was, and also just 
as the negroes were brought to this country and sold as slaves. 
How many of these could tell who their ancestors were ? Not 
one. If some Moses would spring up and lead these people 
from the United States of America, what a blessing it would be 
to us and to posterity ! The reason that Moses did not give 
the liistory of the Jews in Egypt in his writings is obvious : it 
did not suit his plans or purposes to write their history there, 
as the Patriarchs had to be introduced so as to make them a 



THE HEBREWS WERE IDOLATORS. 29 

godlike people, descended from a long line of ancestors to whom 
God had made a great many promises of future protection, all 
of which is pure fiction — the emanation of the brain of Moses. 
That the 'Jews were slaves in Egypt there is no doubt, but how 
they got there is another question. The probabilities are that 
most of them were captured in battle and taken theie ; and, 
having to perform all the menial work of that country, they 
became a very low grade of the human family ; Moses could 
not say anything good of them, as they had become so debased 
and steeped in tilth and sin ; therefore he ignored their history 
in Egypt entirely, or, perhaps, Avas not able to write it for the 
want of some data to do it with. It is a well surmised fact 
that Moses wrote a part of the Pentateuch in the land of Mi- 
dian : that is why we think it is all fiction up to the time of 
their exodus, from Egypt. If the Jews were descended from 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who were represented as god- like 
people, why did they not have some form of Keligion in Egypt 
of the same character ? From all the evidence we can glean 
from the writings of Moses, they had not the faintest idea of a 
Supreme Being up to that time, nor did Moses or his people 
ever have the proper idea of the Great Almighty : their God 
was the God of the Jews and nothing else. 

Moses is generally represented as a great Law-giver, which is 
a great mistake. Some of his laws may have suited in after 
ages, but for the Jews leaving Egypt they were not suitable : 
for as soon as he promulgated some of his laws they were repu- 
diated by his people, for they were so steeped in ignorance and 
filth from their long servitude that they could not be restrained 
by any laws. 

People have to be educated to appreciate laws — the Jews at 
that time were savages and nothing else. One of the mistakes 
of Moses was that he tried to do too much in too short a time ; 
he believed in that magical rod that he broug:ht with him, and 
tried to do things as he represented his God did at the creation 
of the world. Moses did not try to write the real history of 
the Jews, or perhaps he was not sufficiently informed to do so, 
for he tells us that they were in Egpyt four hundred and thirty 
years, when, according to his genealogical account, they were 



30 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

there for the spa:;e of only two hundred and fifteen years. 

As an evidence that the Jews in Egypt were Idolafcors, and 
had never up to that time heard of or known anything of God, 
or had any evidence of forms or ceremonies appertaining there- 
to, we refer the reader to the concluding conversation between 
Moses and his Grod, on Mount Sinai : Exodus, chapter 3rd, 
verse 13th. *' And Moses said unto God, Behold, when 1 
come unto the cliildren of Israel, and shall say unto them. The 
God of your fathers hath sent me unto you ; and they shall say 
to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them ? '^ 
Exodus, chapter 4th, verse 1st, says, '^ And Moses answered 
and said, But, behold, they will not believe me, or hearken 
unto my voice : for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared 
unto thee.'^ There cannot be any better evidence than these 
two verses that the Jews knew nothing of God, not even the 
name of the Great Jehovah, as they are said to have called God 
before and after this time. 

Moses was an Idolator until he went to the Land of Midian, 
and never much more, as he had not the correct idea of God, 
the Great, Supreme Ruler. Moses, according to his own ac- 
count of himself, must have been a great hypocrite and full of 
self-esteem, for he says of himself, *^ Now this man Moses, is 
one of the meekest men living, above all men that were upon 
the face of the earth. ^' Now we all know that honest men 
never speak of themselves in that way ; beside, we also know 
from his own account that he was anything else than meek. 
He was not very meek when he sneaked up to the Egyptian 
and killed him, nor was he the next day when he wanted to 
kill some more ; nor was he when he bullied the shepherd in 
the Land of Midian ; nor was he when he took his father-in - 
law^s flocks to Mount Sinai, intending to keep them ; nor was 
he when he whipped his God, who, he says, was trying to kill 
him, on his way to Egypt ; nor was he when in the presence 
of Pharaoh ; nor was he in giving so many lies about his mira- 
cles in Egypt, and, finally, when he got the Jews in what he 
calls the wilderness and caused himself to be styled, ^^My 
Lord Moses,^' — nor did he show any meekness in any part of 
his history. 



THE JEWS WERE A MIXED RACE. 31 

Moses, with all his meekness, represents himself as a power 
behind the throne, stronger than the throne itself. In all of 
his writings he represents his God as a weak and vacillating 
being, who is continually swearing to do something that he 
never does. His God, also, did a great many foolish things : 
among them he offered to destroy all of his chosen people 
because they were so bad, and to make the seed of Moses his 
chosen people ; but Moses fell on his knees and begged his 
God not to do so foolish a thing, as he would become the 
laughing-stock of all the heathen nations. Can any one 
imagine a more absurd thing than this account, particularly 
when it is applied to our Great God, the Creator and Kuler of 
the Universe? But, when applied to the God of Moses, there 
is nothing strange, for he was ah Idol, invented by Moses. 

The Jews in Egypt were a mixed race, mostly negroes, taken 
there at different times and sold as slaves ; some may have 
been captured, in battle — these were the Government slaves, 
and were the ones who made bricks. They were all of a much 
lower grade of the human family than our slaves were in the 
South previous to their liberation. Then, too, they must have 
been guilty of all the sins of omission and commission that the 
Laws of Moses call their attention to, and the severe penalties 
attached to them. Moses, being a gentleman of education and 
refinement, having been educated by the Koyal family of 
Egypt, seeing the low condition these people were in, made 
these severe laws to regenerate them, so as to have a better 
class of people to reign over. Everything he did was for 
his own self interest, for there was no more sympathy between 
him and these slaves, in blood or otherwise, than there was 
between Abraham Lincoln and the Southern negro. 

The whole of the writings of Moses are vague, mystifying 
and unreliable ; they were not intended to be read through by 
those who wrote them, (for it is surmised that Moses did not 
write one half that he has the credit of) nor by those who 
adopted them as the foundation of the Christian Bible, nor to 
be studied, but only that some desirable passages might be 
quoted, just as a Law book of the present day. Moses was no 
doubt a great man in his day and generation ; he had been 



32 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AIJTALTZED. 

educated in all the higher branches of the Arts and Sciences 
and the Literature that the Land of Egypt was capable of 
bestowing upon him, and he no doubt occupied a very high 
position in that country, for we are told by Josephus that he 
commanded an Egyptian army that conquered an adjoining 
negro nation, and also that the reigning Princess of that coun- 
try became his wife. 

Moses was ambitious to become a great King over these 
people that he stole from the Egyptians, and, notwithstanding 
his failure in this regard, a greater destiny has been awarded 
him : for in all the history of the world there never was a man 
who became so immortalized as he. But, with all this fame 
and immortality of his name, there never was a prominent 
man in history so little deserving of tliis that has been awarded 
him : for, of the whole of his life, which is said to have been 
one hundred and twenty years, we have only three years of his 
own history that can be relied upon : the whole of his life is 
shrouded in darkness and mystery ; and the so-called Jews, or 
children of Fsrael, have no history that can be relied on before 
their exodus from Egypt. 



CHAPTER TWO. 

MOSES IK THE DARK. 

THERE IS a conundrum which asks, ^MVhere was Moses 
when the light went out?'' The answer is, '^ In the dark.'' 
There could not be anything more appropriate in regard to 
Moses : for, in the first place, he is presented to us as an infant 
rescued from the river Nile ; he is adopted by Pharaoh's 
daughter, who places him in charge of his own mother to 
nurse ; then his light goes out for forty years ; not a word more 
do we get from this great historian of his own life, or in any 
other history, during all this time. A man like him must 
have had an interesting history, but for some good reason, best 
and only known to himself, he is entirely silent. At the end 
of that time he reappears, and he says he went out to see how 
his people were faring ; he saw an Egyptian striving with a 
Jew, and, not seeing anyone else in sight, he sneaked up and 
killed the Egyptian aud buried him in the sand ; the next day 
he went out again and saw two Jews striving together, and 
reprimanded them, but they retaliated by charging him with 
murdering the Egyptian. Seeing that his crime was disco- 
vered, and knowing the consequence, he immediately fled to 
the Land of Midian. We next find him at the well, bullying 
the shepherds, whom he drove from the well, and he assisted 
the daughters of the Priest of Midian to water their flock. 
The daughters informed their father of the assistance they had 
had from an Egyptian, and Moses was sent for, to eat bread 
with the family ; and being a well-educated gentleman of good 
presence, and no doubt having a big sword by his side, he was 
made a member of the family — and then his '* light" goes out 
again for forty more years. During all this time, the only in- 
timation of what he was doing, is, that he had charge of his 
c (33) 



34 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

father-in-law's flocks and herds. At the end of this second 
forty years he reappears again, and he says he led his father- 
in-law's flock back of the desert to the Mount of God. This 
may appear very simple to the readers, but when they come to 
examine the country and the distance from Midian to Mount 
Sinai, it will appear as a very extraordinary proceeding. He 
had to travel over three hundred miles through a desert, with 
very little water or pasturage for the beasts ; and the only con- 
clusion that we can arrive at is that he was practising for events 
to come, or that his movement was premature : for he returned 
to his wife and home, and gave up the flock to their proper 
owner. No doubt he found out in his expedition that flocks 
and herds could be had in abundance without robbing his 
family. At Mount Sinai he met his God, who employed him 
to deliver the Jews from their bondage in Egypt, and they then 
and there entered into a triple alliance for that purpose — the 
high contracting parties being, first, his God, then Moses, and 
Aaron. This alliance was offensive and defensive : Moses was 
to be the Commander-in-chief ; Aaron, the spokesman and 
Priest, and the God was to be a silent partner to assist them 
with all his resources and power. This God was the God of 
the Hebrews, not the great Ruler of the Universe. If God 
Almighty wants to accomplish anything,, He does not require 
the aid of man. He has but to order his wish and it is done 
with the quickness of lightning. There is no circumlocution 
with our God, the God of the Heathens — as they call us. This 
we think we know from the experience of the last two thousand 
years. We feel that our God is Omnipotent and Omnipresent, 
and does not require the aid of man to do His will. 

After entering into this triple alliance, Moses returns to 
Midian, resigns his office and asks the privilege of returning 
to his own country, which is readily granted. He left with his 
wife and two sons for the Land of Egypt ; and on his way 
there a very extraordinary event occurred to him. He tells us 
that they stopped at an Inn for rest and refreshment, and 
there he met his God again. It seems that they had some dis- 
acyreement, for his God tried to kill him — a bad commence- 
ment for the triple alliance, — but Moses, being the better man 



THE ENCHANTING ROD. 35 

of the two, came off victorious '; but, unlike Jacob, who had 
the same difficulty, Moses got no blessing. If Moses had been 
killed then and there, the Jews would perhaps still be in Egypt. 
What a blessing that would have been to mankind — all except 
the Egyptians. Moses intimates that the cause of the quarrel 
was that he had not circumcised his sons ; wliich operation 
was performed by his wife, he tells us, notwithstanding the 
children must have been past thirty years of age — for they had 
been living together nearly forty years. When he got near his 
destination he was joined by his brother Aaron, with whom, 
no doubt, he had been in communication before this ; they 
completed their plans and then presented themselves first to 
the Jews in Egypt, who were only waiting for some one com- 
petent to take charge of them and lead them from that country. 
Moses, who had been educated in all the higher branches of 
Egyptian lore, which consisted mainly of Astrology, Necro- 
mancy and Legerdemain, and being an adept in these arts, had 
prepared himself to appear before Pharaoh and his Court. 
Before appearing, however, before Pharaoh, he gave an exhi- 
bition to his own people, to satisfy them that he was inspired 
by his God and sent to them as a leader, and showed them his 
enchanting rod as his credentials. The Jews were satisfied to 
trust him, for any change to them was desirable, and as there 
is no doubt but that they had been in communication with 
Moses for some time through the intermediation of Aaron, 
they readily consented. Moses and Aaron then presented 
themselves to Pharaoh and made the demand for the privilege 
of a three days' journey in the wilderness to worship the God 
of the Hebrews ; and, to convince Pharaoh that they were on 
a divine mission, Moses went through some of his tricks of 
Legerdemain, but Pharaoh was not so easily fooled as the Jews. 
There is no doubt he could do the same thing, and he called 
for his sleight-of-hand men and they did the same tricks ; but 
Moses tells us that his rod, which he had turned into a serpent, 
swallowed all the others I But that did not help him, as he 
was ordered to get to his task of work the same as the- other 
Jews. But Moses knew his backing, for the Jews had become 
so numerous that they were hard to manage ; and Pharaoh was 



36 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

therefore compelled to temporize with them. This is what 
made Moses so bold in appearing before Pharaoh several times. 
He then tells us that he brought on a great many plagues in 
the Land of Egypt to punish Pharaoh and to compel him to 
let the people go : but all this stuif is lies and humbuggery. 
As an evidence of this we will give an account of one of the 
plagues and let the reader judge. Moses says that he brought 
on a plague that i{:illed all the cattle and horses that were in 
the whole Land of Egypt ; and then again, for the second time, 
he brought on a plague that killed all the cattle and horses 
that were in the field ; and then again, for the third time, he 
brought on another plague that killed all the first-born of the 
people and the cattle and horses that were in all the Land of 
Egypt ; and then again, for the fourth time, to cap the climax, 
he killed all of Pharaoh's army chariot horses and horsemen 
that pursued them to the Red Sea. It will be seen, here, that 
he killed all the horses four times ; and it will also be noticed 
that he speaks of the Land of Egypt as if it was nothing more 
than a mere city in extent ! All this account of his miracles 
was intended to impress the Jews with his might and power : 
for they saw nothing of any of these miracles, as they were in 
a country by themselves and were told by Moses that they 
would be exempt from them. 

We hope our readers will open their Bible and read this out- 
landish story ; and here is another, still more j)alpably absurd. 
Moses tells us that the Hebrews in Egypt at the time of his 
birth had become so numerous that Pharaoh issued a command 
to kill all the male infants of the Jewish population, and that 
he was miraculously saved by being floated down the river Nile 
in a small ark, and falling into the hands of Pharaoh's daugh- 
ter who adopted him. There is no evidence that this order 
was revoked, and notwithstanding this horrible butchery of all 
the male children, he tells us that, eighty years after his birth, 
he marched out of Egypt a Jewish army of six hundred thou- 
sand men between the ages of twenty and fifty years. All of 
these men must have been born after Moses was thirty years of 
age — inside of fifty years — and they would represent a popula- 
tion of between four and five million souls, procreated from 



LAl^D OF GOSHEK. 37 

seveuty-five souls in two hundred and fifteen years ! Anyone 
of common judgment can see that this is a silly untruth : for, 
if there were that many people, there was not one-fourth room 
enough for them in the land of Goshen ; and he also tells us 
that they had very much cattle and flocks. Now, four million 
people with all their household goods and vei^ much cattle 
could not find space enough to stand in line between the river 
Nile and the Red Sea, which are only seventy or eighty miles 
apart, and yet he says that they made two camps in their march 
to the Red Sea ; he then says that they all crossed over in one 
night. This we also know to be untrue, as it would take at 
least ten days for all these people with all their belongings to 
pass any given point. 

If Moses had had the least or the remotest idea how long his 
writings would be read and criticised, he perhaps would have 
been more particular and truthful. The great misfortune to 
our people is, that, in reading the Old Testament, they do not 
take the trouble to examine as to the probability of these 
accounts. 

Moses tells us that when Jacob and his family went down to 
Egypt he was given the Land of Goshen for himself and his 
family of seventy-two souls ; and it was plenty large enough 
for them and all their cattle at that time. Any one who will 
look at the map will see that there is not room enough for one- 
tenth of the number that Moses says he marched out of Egypt. 
It is very probable that a large number of the Jewish slaves 
were in the Land of Goshen, and also very probable that the 
greater portion of them were scattered all over the country, 
just as our slaves were in the South, serving masters in the 
different parts of the Land of Egypt. 

Moses tells us that the Jews were in Egypt four hundred and 
thirty years. This we also know to be untrue, or his genealogy 
is wrong : for there were four generations who went down into 
Egypt, namely, Jacob, Judah, Pharez and Ezrom ; and Jacob 
was one hundred and twenty years of age. In all that time 
there were but seventy-five souls, including Joseph and his two 
sons. In Egypt there wer6 born Amrani, Amminadab and 
Naashon — the last one being one of the so-called Princes that 



38 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

marched out with Moses. Now, that four generations should 
only increase to seventy-five souls, and then, in three genera- 
tions more, increase to four or five millions, no sensible person 
will believe, except he is a Jew, and he will swallow anything 
written by Moses. Josephus, the celebrated Jewish historian, 
feeling ashamed of this unreasonable account as given by Moses 
respecting the number of Jews leaving Egypt, cuts the number 
down to six hundred thousand all told — men, women and chil- 
dren. He had access to all the evidence there was in his time, 
which was the first century of the Christian era ; and, being a 
priest, he had the opportunity of knowing the facts. He con- 
tradicts Moses and makes him a falsifier of history. Moses 
claims that he was guided by God : but the serious question 
to consider is. Who was this Grod that he was so much beholden 
to ? Was it the G-reat God of the Universe, or was it the God 
of the Hebrews only ? He never speaks of the God in heaven, 
but always a God on earth. Now, if we judge the matter from 
our own standpoint, we know that an inferior has to wait on 
his superiors to receive orders ; and as there is no evidence 
that Moses was ever invited up to Heaven to receive the wishes 
of God, we must naturally conclude that the God of Moses was 
an earthly God. Besides, no sensible person of the present 
day will think that the Great God of the Universe would make 
His Majesty and Greatness so common as the God of Moses 
did. The present idea of all disinterested persons is, that God, 
our Great Creator, never was revealed to man upon earth, ex- 
cept by His works ; and we further think that our knowledge 
is better than that of Moses, or any other Jew ; and we know 
that our Heavenly Creator treats us all alike — both Jew and 
Gentile — the blessings from Heaven coming to all without any 
distinction. 

All that Moses claims for the Jews is utterly false and un- 
worthy of the respect that has heretofore been shown to it. 
His account of the passage of the Red Sea is another one of his 
Munchausen stories. The Red Sea in its principal part is from 
twenty to thirty miles wide, and Moses tells us that God 
divided the water to let the Jews pass over. From the evidence 
we now have, we know this to be untrue. About fifty years 



CROSSING THE RED SEA. 39 

ago the govern ments of Great Britain and France, for some 
purpose of their own, appointed surveyors and engineers — the 
most competent that they liad — to survey and plat the whole 
of that country : Egypt, the Red Sea, the Desert, all the land 
of Palestine and all the surroundings. On the plat, which is 
now before the writer, these scientific men traced the route the 
Jews took and pursued all around the Desert to their final 
destination. We learn from this that instead of crossing the 
body of the sea they crossed over a small neck at the western 
end that was not more than half a mile wide, and the water 
was very shallow, and there is no doubt but this was a crossing 
place for a long time before. If the Jews were half as nume- 
rous as Moses makes them, there was not nearly room enough 
for them in the Land of Goschen, therefore the greater portion 
of them must have been on the opposite side of the Red Sea, 
which is a good country, and it was only those who were in 
the Land of Goshen who crossed on a causeway that they had 
been in the habit of using. When the Egyptians attempted to 
cross on this frail structure they met with some disaster, but 
it is not likely that it was such as Moses represents it to be. 

Moses says that not a vestige of the Egyptians was left — but 
he says so many improbable things that we cannot believe him. 

The writings of Moses were mostly intended for the coming 
generations : his generation (except some of the Levites) knew 
nothing of them. There is great probability that much of 
these writings was written, a long time after his death, by 
the Priests and the Levites, to perpetuate their power and in- 
fluence over the Jews. In regard to the ^^ pillar of fire,"' that 
was easily accomplished by Moses sending a beacon light ahead 
of the traveling Jewish horde. When Moses got the Jews be- 
yond the reach of the Egyptians, he assumed the role of Prince 
and commenced this assumption by issuing very stringent laws. 
He established a Court of which the Priests and Levites were 
the principal personages ; he made his brother the High Priest 
and selected all the best men, whom he called the tribe of Levi, 
and armed them for his body guard, and also as a police to 
keep the unruly horde of savages in restraint ; but, notwith- 
standing all these precautions, he could not manage them to 



40 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALYZED. 

his desire : for according to his own writings the Hebrews had 
been but a few months from their bondage when they rebelled 
against the assumption of Moses and the Levites, and against 
the severe laws that were promulgated in the name of the Lord. 
These laws would virtually place them into a second bondage. 
Any one reading this part of the Bible carefully will see that 
the Jews took very little stock in the triple alliance. 

Moses tried to instil into the Jewish mind a reverence for 
his God : how far he succeeded their conduct a short time after 
at Mount Sinai showed, where they made a golden calf and 
worshipped it. This is what they had been educated to do ; 
and Moses was a little too hasty in trying to make them change 
their mode of worship in a few days. Moses had provided him- 
self with a retiring place m which he could consult his God : 
this he did, and he would come out and say " Thus saith the 
Lord.^' Although the Jews were a horde of savages they were 
sharp enough to see through this humbuggery. Moses was, 
therefore, continually in trouble at their want of faith and at 
their disobedience. If the people of the present age would 
read the writings of Moses carefully and exercise unbiassed 
judgment, they would see the absurdity of the whole of this 
conglomerated account, from the creation to Abraham, and 
from that time to Exodus, and then particularly what is called 
the perigrination through or around the Desert. We all feel 
intuitively that our God does not have to give personal service 
to accomplish His will ; our God is far-seeing and does not 
make any such mistakes as those represented by Moses, nor 
does He require the assistance of man to aid Him in any of his 
purposes ; our God is so powerful and so far removed from us 
that man has not sufficient brain to imagine or to form the re- 
motest idea of His Majesty and greatness : our God is present 
and Omnipresent, not only to this world, but to all the other 
worlds that are supposed to exist in *' space,^"* and as we cannot 
imagine any end to space we, therefore, can have no idea of 
the Great Creator — or of the creation — except from the small 
portion we see around us. 

The God of Moses was a weak, vacillating being, continually 
repenting of what he had done, and swearing to do things that 



THE GOLDEN CALF. 41 

never came to pass. On one occasion Moses tells his God to 
jump up and crush his enemies ! We know of a certainty 
that our Clod does not jump at anyone's bidding, nor does He 
show enmity to man ! 

We here ask the indulgence of the reader on account of an 
occasional repetition : we are anxious to impress certain pas- 
sages in the writings of Moses indelibly upon their minds, that 
they may fully realize the absurdity of them. That the Jews 
were Idolators there can be no doubt to any fair-minded person 
who will examine the evidence impartially. 

We will again refer to the actions of the Jews at Mount Si- 
nai, when Moses was absent from them for forty days, up in 
his workshop on the Mount, carving the Ten Commandments 
that he had composed in the Land of Midian, and which he 
said had been written by the finger of God. Now, anyone of 
common sense knows that it would not take our God forty days 
to do what an ordinary workman of the present day can do in 
one or two days at farthest. But Moses was old and feeble and 
must have been a slow workman, as he was not used to this 
kind of labor. This is what caused the delay. The Jews 
thought that Moses and his God had deserted them ; Aaron, 
also, must have had some misgivings about the matter, for, 
when he was called on by the people to make them a god to 
lead them to the Land of Canaan, he made no objection, as it 
came natural to him to do as he had been doing all his life, 
namely, worshipping an idol : for this worship that Moses had 
introduced was an entirely new departure to them. Aaron 
told them to gather all the gold rings from the women's ears, 
with which he moulded a g'olden calf. This was the former 
god of the Jews. When this god was presented to them by 
Aaron, their joy knew no bounds ; they danced and made so 
much noise in their great joy at having their old god restored 
to them again, that the noise reached Moses in his seclusion ; 
and he came down from the Mouat with the slabs in his hands 
— that is, the account says so. Now, as it would take at least 
four slabs two feet long by eighteen inches wide to carve all 
these letters on, and as the slabs must have been about one and 
a-half inches thick, they were more in weight than one man 



42 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ASTALYZED. 

could carry, much less an old and feeble man of eighty years ! 
But the Bible says so : and who dares dispute what this Book 
says ? (Here is one who does.) 

When Moses saw what was going on he was terribly angry 
with them for their apostacy from the worship of his God : but 
a dog will go back to his vomit, and so it was but natural for 
these savage brutes to go to their former worship. It was not 
worship or Gods that Moses cared for, but this action of his 
people was interfering with his ambitious plans : he therefore 
called to his assistance his Levite guards and they fell upon 
the most prominent ones and killed three thousand of them — 
for doing that which they had been taught to do all their lives, 
and which Moses also had been educated to do ! Now, to show 
the inconsistency of this action on the part of Moses, one of 
the Laws that he had been at so much trouble to compose and 
carve said, ^' Thou shalt not kill,^" and he was the first one to 
violate the command ! (Aaron, who was the most notable of 
the sinners, was let off with a reprimand, for he belonged to 
the triple Alliance- and could not be spared.) The slabs that 
had cost so much time and labor were dashed upon the ground 
and broken into fragments, and his God had to do the whole 
job over again, notwithstanding his fingers must have been 
sorely tried by the forty days' labor that Moses had destroyed. 
These Laws, that were enunciated by Moses and called the 
^^ Ten Commandments,'' were very good and are still highly 
appreciated, but they were entirely unsuited to the people for 
whom they were intended, for the Jews of that period had no 
more reverence for them than might reasonably have been ex- 
pected, and, in all their history, these Laws were more conspi- 
cuously violated than they were observed by them. Moses 
concocted these laws and many others while he was in the land 
of Midian ; his great ambition was to establish a new nation 
and make himself the king : and if these plans had only com- 
menced with that period they would not, he thought, answer 
the purpose. He, therefore, commenced his history with the 
creation of the world, for he thought it was necessary to make 
the Jews believe that they were descended from a godly people 
and that God had in former days taken their ancestors under 



THE JEWS WERE LIKE OUR SLAVES. 4:) 

His especial care, and he therefore had to go back and give 
their genealogy from Adam to Abraham and so on to the time 
then present. He tells in his writings that God recommended 
the institution of circumcision, so as to make the Jews His 
peculiar people. This we know to be untrue, for there is some 
evidence that the Egyptians had practised this ceremony pre- 
vious to them, and the evidence is wanting that the Jews in 
Egypt knew anything about it, for Moses him.>:elf was not cir- 
cumcised, nor were his children by the Midianitish wife, nor 
were any of those who were born in all the forty years after 
their exodus until they were about to enter the Land of Canaan, 
and therefore this institution was an invention of Moses to im- 
press the Jews as to their duty in the worship of a new God of 
whom they had been entirely ignorant until his second advent 
into Egypt. The Jews had been in bondage so long and kept 
in so debased a condition that the probabilities are that they 
had no knowledge of how they got there, or from whence they 
came; just the same as with our negro population, who now 
number about eight million of souls, not one of all these eight 
millions could tell where their ancestors came from or who 
they were. If some Moses would spring up for them and lead 
them out of this country it would be as great a blessing to us 
— we cannot help thinking — as it was to the Egyptians to get 
rid of the Jews. 

The history of these two people are analogous cases. Moses 
was an adept in the art of legerdemain, and therefore tried to 
do too much in too short a time. If the people had been edu- 
cated to understand these very elaborate laws that he had taken 
so much pains to write, the result might have been different : 
but, being utterly uncivilized and brutal, they could not ap- 
preciate anything about a former history that told of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob, nor could they have any idea of tlie patriarchs 
that Moses introduced to subserve his own ambition. When 
the Jews were gotten out of Egypt they were divided into 
tribes ; the best men and those most to be relied upon were 
made tlie tribes of Levi and Judah — for Moses wanted them 
for his soldiers, guards and police, to keep the others in sub- 
jection. They were the elite of the Jewish population. Just 



44 MOSAIC HISTORY OF- THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

like the professional gentry who are among us : they were not 
to perform any labor in tilling the soil ; all the other tribes 
were required to contribute one tenth of all the accretion of 
the laud and animals to support them — even the first-born of 
all the children and those animals that were not edible had to 
be redeemed and the money paid towards the support of the 
Levites. 

When the Jews left Mount Sinai, says Moses, they were wan- 
dering in the desert for thirty-eight years, living on quail and 
manna, but he is silent about the water and what the cattle 
had for food. Silence, with him, was golden ; for whenever 
he tells anything it is more like lead than gold ! The meagre 
account he gives of the peregrination in the desert is entirely 
void of truth, for the truth has been demonstrated — as we have 
already recounted — by the surveys instituted by France and 
England. When the Jews left Egypt they traveled along the 
shores of the Red Sea in a southerly direction for about four 
hundred miles. All this country was thickly inhabited before 
the Jews passed over it, but when they left it — it was a wild- 
erness indeed ! This is the country that gave birth to Moham- 
med and Mohammedanism. At Mount Sinai the Jews were 
kept by Moses for about eighteen months, and when they left 
they took a northerly course through the desert of Paran for 
about two hundred and thirty miles, to that part of the Land 
of Canaan that was afterwards occupied by the tribe of Judah; 
they then continued along towards the Mediterranean for about 
one hundred and sixty miles, to that portion that was after- 
ward occupied by the tribe of Simeon, and bordering on the 
ocean. All this country was then occupied by the Philistines. 
They then continued along the shores of the ocean about one 
hundred and sixty miles to that point now called the Isthmus 
of Suez. The}^ then took a southerly course for about one 
hundred and eighty miles to the Red Sea, their first starting- 
place ; then aloug^ the Red Sea again about one hundred and 
eighty miles ; then they took an easterly course for about three 
hundred and ten miles to the Gulf of Arabia; then a north- 
easterly course again one hundred and fifteen miles to the land 
of Edom and Moab ; they then went through the land that was 



MOSES DEPOSED BY JOSHUA. " 45 

afterwards occupied by the tribes of Eeuben and Gad, one hun- 
dred and thirty-five miles ; then they turned back in a zigzag 
course to the place where they crossed over the river Jordan ; 
crossing the river Jordan, they traveled one hundred and sev- 
enty-five miles to that part occu2:)ied by the tribe of Benjamin. 
The whole of their traveling was about eighteen hundred miles 
in forty years — less than fifty miles in each year, or less than 
one mile in each week. With the exception of having crossed 
the desert twice, they were all the time in a good country where 
they could raise crops and levy contributions upon the inhabi- 
tants, also having good pasturage for their herds and flocks. 
Now, the serious question for us to consider is, What were they 
doing all this time ? Moses does not give us one word con- 
cerning their doings : perhaps he was ashamed of their con- 
duct, or, in other words — his 'Highf went out for the third 
time in thirty-eight years ! We recommend anyone who is at 
all anxious to know what they were doing all the time to read 
of the treatment of the Midianites, and then they can form a 
good idea of what was being done around the Desert, of which 
we shall have much to say when we get to the proper place. 
And let us now go back to the Mount again, as we have neg- 
lected this abode of the God of Moses, and tell of some of their 
doings at that place. The Jews had scarcely left Egypt when 
they commenced murmuring and rebelling against the arbi- 
trary laws that Moses wanted to put in force. Moses says that 
it was the flesh-pots of Egypt that they were longing for, but 
it was something more serious than that, for he tells us they 
had abundance of herds atid flocks when they left Egypt, and 
we hope we have demonstrated that they were most of the time 
in a good country — in fact, they were much better situated than 
they were in Egpyt. What Moses says about the '^ flesh-pots'^ 
was only to hide their sins, for they were murdering and plun- 
dering all the country around the Desert, and instead of their 
cattle being diminished they were greatly augmented. 

Moses was an adept in all the Egyptian arts and sciences, 
for no pains had been spared to make him worthy of his pa- 
troness, and he could therefore perform some of those wonders 
that he attributed to the power of his God. There can be no 



46 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AKALYZED. 

doubt but that he was a consummate impostor, a great man, 
but not a good one. If any reader of these pages can point to 
a good or disinterested action in the whole course of his life, 
he can do more than the writer of them, for he has not been 
able to discover one. He was selfish and cruel to the last de- 
gree ; he took the Jews — a low, degraded class of the human 
family — from Egypt, and tried to elevate them to the dignity 
of a nation for his own aggrandizement, but failed from the fact 
that he did not possess any of " the milk of human kindness/' 
He commenced too soon to act the tyrant : but the Jews saw 
through his schemes and would not submit to his arbitrary 
rule. They therefore took matters in their own hands and be- 
came a band of robbers, with Joshua for their leader ; and 
Moses, instead of becoming a king, to which exalted position 
he was aspiring, became a cipher in the Jewish camp and could 
not restrain the people : for it was not laws or worship that 
they wanted, but plunder and freedom, and they got both — 
and Moses got a crown of thorns. When he had gotten them 
to what he termed the Mount of God, he kept them there 
for more than a year trying all the means at which he was such 
an adept to subject them to his wishes, but without success. 
Failing in all fair means, he tried to intimidate them : for in- 
stance, there was a volcano on Mount Sinai in active operation 
and he told them it was God thundering his displeasure at 
their conduct ! Many other stratagems he employed to cow 
them — all to no purpose ; and when all these means failed, he 
would just call out his trusty Levites and kill a host of them, 
and this last resort was the crowning act in his unfortunate 
career, for, instead of becoming subjects, they became bitter 
enemies — a strong proof of which is afforded by the fate that 
met him on Mount Pisgah. 



CHAPTER THREE. 

THE JEWS '^ GOING IT '' ALONE. 

WHEN THE Jews left Mount Sinai they took a westerly 
course across the desert to the Land of Canaan, and it was 
perhaps their intention to stay there, but for some reason of 
which we are not informed they continued on to the great 
ocean, and then kept on moving around until they got to their 
old starting-place. When they got there, there was no God to 
protect them : in fact, they did not need any, for they were 
^^ going if alone. The Egyptians were not such a terror to 
them now as on the first occasion, when their God had to part 
the waters of the Red Sea to let them escape ; and they had be- 
come adepts in the arts of robbing and throat-cutting — for 
they had had an experience of thirty-eight years in this busi- 
ness — and they were now just making calls, and no doubt 
called on their old masters and cleaned them out for the second 
time. They did not requirt^ a beacon light and an angel now 
to lead them through the wilderness — it was all plain sailing, 
without the assistance of the triple alliance. They were not 
innocent pilgrims looking for the Mount of God ! Particular 
attention is now called to their second advent to the place 
where, as Moses tells us, they crossed the Red Sea with so much 
fear and trepidation. Moses must have been with them when 
they passed it for the second time, but there is not a word said 
about it — they did not even stop to hunt up any of the relics 
of Pharaoh's army, but passed the place in silent contempt ! 

Had Moses possessed some of the more modern ideas — such 
as those introduced by the Greeks and Romans — and brought 
heaven and hell to his assistance, he could, perhaps, more ef- 
fectually have cowed the unruly Jews. The promise of a crown 
of glory and the threatening of hell and damnation might have 
(47) 



48 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

had some effect, as it has certainly had for the last eighteen 
hundred years in most parts of the civilized world : but Moses 
only inculcates material punishment in this world, therefore 
the Jews thought that a bird in the hand was worth two in the 
bush, and they took the risk and responsibility and gathered 
in the spoils. 

We have given many evidences of the fact that the God of 
the Hebrews was not the Universal God, for they never claimed 
any such distinction for their God, and they were perfectly 
right and consistent in this regard, for every nation of the 
human family at that period, and in all subsequent periods, 
had their peculiar God to worship, and why should not the 
Jews have the same privilege ? What we iSnd fault with, is, 
that our people should accept this Jewish God as the Universal 
God — that they have no more reverence for the Great Creator 
than to accept this picture of the Jew God as the representa- 
tion of their God and of our God. We will here give further 
evidence of this fact. It is well known to all Bible readers 
that the Samaritans who succeeded the Ten Tribes of Israel 
adopted the Jewish faith and were no doubt better Jews m a 
religious point of view than were the Jews themselves : for, 
when the Judeans returned from Babylon, they had not wor- 
shipped their God during all the period of their captivity, 
while the Samaritans had continued in this worship. When 
they got back to Jerusalem they had none of the sacred scrolls 
and the Samaritans offered them a copy of theirs, which were 
true copies of the original, and they also offered to assist in the 
rebuilding of the Temple : all of which kindness was refused 
by these stiff-necked egotists, as the following quotation will 
show: — Ezra, chapter 4th: ^^Now when the adversaries of 
Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity 
builded the temple unto the Lord God of Israel ; Then they 
came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the fathers, and said 
unto them. Let us build with you : for we seek your God, as 
ye do ; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esar- 
haddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither. But Ze- 
rubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers 
of Israel, said unto them. Ye haye nothing to do with us to 



MOSES AND HIS BOGUS GOD. 49 

build a house unto our God; but we ourselves together 
will build unto the Lord God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king 
of Persia hath commanded us/' Here is a people who had not 
served their God for seventy years refusing the proffer of those 
who had been God-serving people all of that time. 

Moses said unto his God, ^^ Behold when I come unto the 
children of Israel and shall say unto them, the God of your 
fathers hath sent me unto you, and they shall say unto me, 
who IS God, luliat is his name 9 what shall I say unto them ? '' 
In another place Moses says unto Pharaoh, ^^ The God of the 
Hebrews hath met us, let us go we pray thee three days' jour- 
ney iuto the wilderness to sacrifice unto our God/' These 
expressions of Moses prove that it was not the Universal God, 
but the God of the Jews only, that they worshipped : this God 
said unto Moses, " See, I have made thee a God unto Pharaoh 
and Aaron shall be thy prophet/' This was a title conferred 
upon Moses by his God that he was not slow in taking advan- 
tage of, for after that time whenever he issued a command he 
would say, *' Thus saith the Lord," meaning himself. As 
further evidence we quote Exodus, chapter 22nd, verses 28th 
and 29th. We read: *^' Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor 
curse the ruler of thy people. Thou shalt not delay to offer 
the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors : the first-born 
of thy sons shalt thou give unto me." 

We now come to the acme of all the evidence that Moses had 
a God of his own, whom he called the God of the Hebrews — 
a God that he had made and set up on Mount Sinai to convince 
the Jews that they had a God, and Moses was his prophet. 
In Exodus, chapter 24th, verses 9th, 10th and 11th, we read : 
'* Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and 
seventy of the elders of Israel ; And they saw the God of Israel: 
and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sap- 
phire-stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. 
And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his 
hand : also they saw God, and did eat and drink." 

Moses had this show in a grotto. He placed the Jews at a 
distance from it, and only himself and Aaron approached and 
raised tke curtains, and there displayed the God of Israel, 

D 



50 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

which was nothing more than a dummy prepared for the occa- 
sion. " And the Lord said unto Moses, Come up to me into 
the Mount, and be there ; and I will give thee tables of stone, 
and a Law, and commandments which I have written ; that 
thou mayest teach them.^^ Here was a picnic gotten up by 
Moses to humbug the Jews : how much they were impressed 
by this display we leave the reader to judge from their conduct 
a few days after this. Moses went up to his workshop on the 
Mount to prepare the slabs, with his commandments carved on 
them, and, being an old man, he was too long in accomplishing 
his job ; and when he came down he found the whole camp in 
confusion and the idolatrous Jews doing what they had been in 
the habit of doing all their lives, dancing around and worship- 
ing a golden calf. The Elders had their picnic on the Mount, 
and the people were having a picnic of their own, the Elders 
no doubt joining in. 

In all ages of the world there seems to have been a strong 
desire to worship some kind of a God, or some unseen object 
that they called god. The most popular form of worship was, 
in former days, consulting the Oracles, which were supposed 
to give answers : and this is the form that Moses adopted — 
he had a sanctuary in which he consulted his God. We now 
call attention to the position that Moses occupied in the Land 
of Midian. He had charge of the herds and flocks of his father- 
in-law ; but by this we must not suppose that he was a shep- 
herd : he had charge of the wealth of the country and was Sec- 
retary of the Treasury to the Prince of Midian, and was also 
a member of a Koyal family. This position gave him influence 
not only at home but, also, in all the surrounding countries. 
He therefore could travel through all these countries to gather 
information for the great events he contemplated bringing 
about. He collected all the fragments of history and tradi- 
tions. This is exactly what he was doing : collecting data to 
enable him' to compile the whole of his history up to the exodus 
and also most of the Laws that he intended to impose upon 
the Jews. He commenced with the Creation, of which he gave 
an account comparable only to the style of Baron Munchausen ; 
then comes the genealogy of the Jews, which was an important 



HIS OCCUPATION" IN MIDIAK. 51 

feature in the programme ; and, now, about the sons of God 
who came upon earth and corrupted the whole of the human 
family, for which the Lord was induced to destroy the world 
by a flood — for the misdeeds of his own sons ! He collected 
together this batch of nonsense and sat down and wrote it all 
out to aid him in the accomplishment of the great desire of his 
heart. 

We will now turn our thoughts to the Land of Midian, and 
endeavor to find out what were the plans that Moses was con- 
cocting during all the forty years that he was there — wrapped 
in profound mystery and darkness to all the rest of mankind. 
We believe he was traveling over the country that became the 
Land of Canaan a part of the time, collecting information and 
the traditions of the country from the inhabitants, to enable 
him to build up the history with which we are familiar in the 
book called Genesis ; and, more particularly, reviewing the 
country that he intended for his future kingdom. These are 
the only legitimate conclusions we can arrive at, as the little 
he tells us is so improbable and mystifying that the ordinary 
reader cannot understand it ; and those who profess to be our 
teachers are just as much mystified as are the people : for, 
in this country — the United States of America — there are at 
least one hundred thousand of our most learned men engaged 
as teachers and devoting all their time in trying to find out the 
mystery, and notwithstanding they and many thousands more 
in other Christian Countries of the world have been several 
centuries at this task they are as far from its elucidation as 
when they began. 

Josephus, feeling ashamed of most of these impossible asser_ 
tions and theories as set forth by Moses, tries to explain some 
of them, but his explanation only makes them appear more 
senseless : for he tells us that before the fall of Adam the ser- 
pents could talk, and that they could walk (as they had legs), 
and many other funny things he tells us, which will be noticed 
further on. 

It is a well known fact that the Jewish scrolls — or, as they 
are very improperly termed, the divine writings — were des- 
troyed on several occasions by enemies who conquered the 



52 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

countries and carried most of the inhabitants into captivity. 
When, as in the latter part of their history, they returned from 
Babylon, they had no perfect copy of these writings and were 
dependent on others for what they could secure, and there are 
many evidences coming to light in the present day proving 
that the copies that are now used are not copies of the original 
Jewish writings. Be this as it may, we — the people — are not 
responsible for it : it was those who handed them down to us, 
and responsibility also rests upon those who still uphold them, 
for it is evident to any ordinary mind that, such as these writ- 
ings are, they are unworthy of common respect as divine 
history : and we object to our teachers trying to mystify the 
people by saying that they mean something other than what 
the English language says as they stand translated. Many of 
our teachers know better than they preach, but they are afraid 
to come out and. acknowledge what they know, absolutely, to 
be true — absolutely true : — fearful, as they are, of throwing 
all our present system of religion into chaos ! And, besides, 
many of them — caring for themselves and not their religion — 
are keeping up the delusion as a matter of business and of 
sheer bread-and-butter ! 

Moses was a man of ability, calculated to fill a large gap in 
any history. Josephus tells us that he commanded an Egypt- 
ian army and conquered the whole of the Ethiopian nation, 
besides marrying the reigning Princess of the country. If this 
be true, he had two negro wives that we know of. A good man 
never objects to the whole of his life's history being open to 
public view ; it is only the crafty and scheming one who hides 
all his actions in darkness and obscurity. 

It is said that Moses lived to the age of one hundred and 
twenty years, of which period we have been made acquainted 
with what took place in about three years ! Now, when a man 
is brought so prominently before us as a divine character, we 
have the right to inquire what he was doing for the greater part 
of his life — in the case of Moses, a balance of one hundred and 
seventeen years — so as to learn the amount of confidence we 
may place in the writings which he has handed down to us as 
being of divine origin. Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, and 



WHAT JOSEPHUS SATS ABOUT MOSES. 53 

this Book contains all of his plans that he was so long in con- 
cocting in Miclian for his own aggrandizement — the great mis- 
fortune to him was that he was too long in perfecting them. 
When he made his advent among the Jews in Egypt for the 
second time, he was, unquestionably, old and feeble, and quite 
disqualified for the taking charge of so many people : his ad- 
vanced age appears to have made him anxious to lose no time 
in assuming the long-coveted position and to reap the honors 
attached to it, and, to hurry things along, he imposed laws of 
so stringent a character that they were entirely repudiated. 
In reading his writings, however, one would imagine that his 
affairs all went along smoothly enough, but the fact was very 
different from this, for, from the time he left Egypt until he 
left Mount Sinai, he was in a perfect whirl of trouble. 

Josephus tells us that the wise men of Egypt foretold that a 
child would be born [this was Moses] among the Jews who 
would ^row up and cause a grieat deal of trouble to the Egypt- 
ian nation, and that this was why Pharaoh caused all of the 
male children to be killed ; but where he got his information 
from it is hard to tell, for there is nothing of the kind in the 
writings of Moses in our Bible. 

Let us now try to show the nature of the plans dreamed of 
by Moses and which occupied his mind for so long a time in 
the Land of Midian. In the first place, he knew the exact 
condition of the slaves in Egypt ; for, notwithstanding that he 
had been absent from the country for a long time, he had in all 
probability been in regular correspondence with his family, and 
was not only making his own plans in Midian, but had his 
emissaries aiding him in Egypt : but the mass of the Hebrews 
had lost sight of him, or knew him not — for forty years makes 
a great change in the affairs of men. His object was to make 
the so-called Hebrews believe that he was a great man sent by 
a powerful God to take charge of them and lead them out of 
servitude. This was just what the Egyptian slaves wanted, as 
they had become very numerous, and only desired a leader to 
take charge of them and they were ready for rebellion. Moses 
had foreseen all this, and he had been many years making pre- 
paration for what he was doing — or going to do. This was not 



C4 MOSAIC HISTOEY OF THE HEBKEWS ANALYZED. 

for the love of his people, but to gratify his own ambition.' 
He only purposed to lead them from their Egyptian slavery to 
another kind of servitude, and as an evidence of this we call 
attention to the fact that among the very first laws that he 
promulgated on leaving Egypt were those for establishing 
human slavery. Moses just wanted to make the Jews believe 
that a powerful God was going to take charge of them, and 
that this Grod was also the Grod of their forefathers. Here is 
a parallel case. The profound ignorance of the negroes of the 
Southern States respecting their ancestors was on a par with 
the ignorance of the Jews on the same question ; but, in the 
case of the latter people, here was Moses who was going to dis- 
pel this ignorance by being — or seeming to be — a veritable 
God-send amongst them, knowing all their ins-and-outs from 
the very creation of the world, if not from some still more re- 
mote period of time ! 

When Moses commenced writing, the world, he says, was 
about twenty-five hundred years old, and the question naturally 
comes up — from whom, and when, and how, and where did he 
get his information ! If we ask the teachers about it, all they 
have to say is, it was ^' inspiration. ^^ But, as we have said 
before — and the conclusion is altogether irresistible — if it were 
inspired by the God of the Universe (our own God and not the 
God of Moses and the Hebrews), it would have the sovereign 
stamp of TRUTH so indelibly affixed to it that it would defy 
the power of man to raise a quibble over a single line of it ! 

Moses picked up his information around and about the Land 
of Midian, and manufactured his account from the data thus 
obtained. He also learned of the existence of the Supreme 
being, that he had never clearly understood before going to 
that country ; and instead of worshipping this Great Being in 
a disinterested manner, he used His name just as a rogue will 
use the name of a good man and forge it on the back of a note. 
He did not care for God or man if he could only obtain his 
own ambitious desires. There is nothing singular in all this, 
for thousands of men of the present day, with all their civiliza- 
tion, stand ready to trample over their fellow men if necessary 
to accomplish their ambitious desires. 



CHAPTER FOUR. 

HISTOEY OF THE CREATIOi^, 

WE WILL now take up the history of the Creation, as it 
is given according to Moses, and we will dissect this so-called 
divine production from the Land of Midian, to ascertain what 
amount of truth or reliability there is in it. Moses says '^ In 
the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. ^^ Well, 
was this the order of their creation ? If — as we jfind it stated 
— the earth was created on the first day and heaven not- until 
the second, it would seem to indicate that God was more mind- 
ful of us than of himself, for he made our home ere he made 
his own. " The earth was without form.^' This we believe to 
be untrue. Modern Science teaches that the earth is a sphere 
rotating on an axis and revolving around the sun. Moses 
thought the earth (the '^ dry land'') was flat and had four cor- 
ners. He says that ^' Darkness covered the vast deep, and God 
said let there be light, and God saw that the light was good."" 
According to this, his God had lived in darkness up to this 
time, besides having no home. '^^ And God divided the light 
from the darkness and called the one day and the other night.'' 
But the sun is always shining, and day and night exist simul- 
taneously in different parts of the earth. Moses says that God 
made the Light on the first day and the Sun on the fourth 
day. This must be untrue, for, otherwise, two-thirds of the 
world and the visible creation were made in the dark. Again 
must we insist that we are not criticising the Creator, but, 
Moses, the historian. 

'* And God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the 
waters," and He divided the waters, taking one half above and 
leaving the other half for the earth. '' And God called the fir- 
mament Heaven." How comfortable his God must have felt 
(65) 



56 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALTZED. 

to have a home and plenty of water with which to furnish his 
creatures with rain. This was the idea that Moses had. ^^ And 
God said, Let the waters be gathered into one place and let the 
dry land appear.'^ And God called the dry land Earth, and 
the water he called Sea. In the present age, if ^^ Science^' is 
to be trusted, any schoolboy knows more than Moses did. He 
was inspired by an ignorant Hebrew God — our boys are inspired 
by educated ''heathen^' teachers. We know, from our inspir- 
ation, that dry land must have existed for a long time before 
there was water in the cavities of the earth, which was the re- 
sult of rains and dews, which gradually increased to rivers, 
lakes and then seas, not in one place only but all over the face 
of the earth; and instead of the land appearing out of the 
water, as Moses says, the water after a great many ages ap- 
peared on the face of the Earth. On the third day God said, 
^* Let the Earth bring forth herbs and grass. ^'' This is another 
error, as there was no sun to make them grow. Our God, 
the Great Creator, does nothing by magic ; everything is done 
by the slow process of nature^s laws. Moses judged the Lord 
by his own magical art : he, being a magician, thought the 
Great Creator was the same, and he therefore invested his 
bogus God with all the supernatural power he could imagine. 
On the fourth day God said '' Let there be light to divide the 
day from the night. ^' JSTow here is another blunder, for they 
already had light, and all the plants were growing before the 
sun was made. '' And God made two great lights, the greater 
to give light by day and the lesser to rule the night. ^^ Moses 
thought that the Sun (like gas-light) was lighted in the morn- 
ing and extinguished at night. He had no idea how the Sun 
got from the setting place back to the rising place. He thought 
that the world was flat and at night it was dark all over the 
world. If there had been any inspiration in the matter Moses 
would have known better, (or the philosophy of modern times 
is not what we take it to be). On the sixth day, God said, 
*^ Let us make man.^' Here is the first intimation we have 
that his God had any assistance in his creation, but this mak- 
ing of man was different from all other works. The idea of 
Moses was, no doubt, that God had a great many wives : in 



LET ''us" MAKE MAN". 57 

fact we can prove this by the evidence which he himself gives, 
for he tells us of the sons of God coming down and marrying 
the daughters of men ; so God created man, both male and fe- 
male, and told them to be fruitful and multiply and replenish 
the Earth. Now, as the Earth had never been inhabited be- 
fore, the word '' replenish '^ is out of place altogether: but 
this is not much of a blunder for Moses, and we can let it pass. 
But, notice — these people who were created on the sixth day 
were the sons and daughters of the God of Moses, having no 
connection whatever with that beautiful fiction relating to 
Adam and Eve. 

Moses tells us that, after God had finished the world, and 
had created man, both male and female, he rested on the 
seventh day — and how long after that 'he does not say. After 
viewing all his works, he saw that there was no man to till the 
soil. God had given his own sons and daughters every tree 
and herb for food, and there were no exceptions ; God blessed 
them, and all they had to do was to be fruitful and multiply: 
This God, according to the narrative of Moses, was very rich 
and could afford to indulge his children. He owned a large 
garden of several millions of acres, and also all the live stock 
in the world ; but, notwithstanding all this wealth, there was 
something wanting — possibly, vegetables for his family : — and 
for that reason he wanted a man to till the soil. He therefore 
made Adam for that purpose ; but, after further consideration, 
he saw that more help was wanted : for there were the cows to 
be milked and the butter to be made, and he concluded that 
he would make another servant. Thinking that a male and 
female would get along better together than two men, he made 
a female help and presented her to Adam, but they were not 
blessed and told to be fruitful : on the contrary, as this God 
did not want any little children running around the kitchen 
and interfering with the culinary operations, he told them that 
the day wherein they tasted the tree of life would be a day of 
sickness, pain and death to them, and the consequences would 
be entailed upon their posterity. But Eve was not equal to 
the emergency, and she allowed the serpent to beguile her : 
and, as we have already seen, that (according to Josephus) the 



58 MOSAIC HISTOEY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

serpents of those days had legs and could talk^ poor Eve fell 
into the trap which Moses indicates was an inspired serpent- 
trap and which we, from the circumstances, would take, rather, 
to be an inspired man-trap ! 

When Eve was presented to Adam, he said ^' she is bone of 
my bone and flesh of my flesh, therefore shall man leave his 
mother and his father and cleave unto his wife/^ Now if there 
were no fathers and mothers in the world at that time, it is a 
puzzle to think where Adam got the idea from, unless, indeed, 
he knew of others of his kind descended from the sons of God. 
Again, Adam called his wife Eve, as he said she was the mother 
of all living. But, as we have heretofore hinted, it is nothing 
but a perversion of language to speak experimentally of that of 
which there is no knowledge. The time for that had not ar- 
rived. The tree of life had not been tasted. The innocence 
of the pair was a bar to the knowledge. When Eve was three 
years of age, according to the date in the Bible, she had given 
birth to two sons, Cain and Abel ; the third son, who was Seth, 
was not born until one hundred and thirty years after. This 
proves that the first pair were not intended to be very fruitful, 
like the sons of God. Cain was cursed by the Lord for having 
killed his brother ; and he complained to the Lord, saying thab 
everyone meeting him would want to kill him. The Lord there- 
fore put a m.ark upon him for protection. Now what we want 
to know is just this : Who was there on Earth to kill him, if 
they were the only people ? Josephus says that it was the wild 
animals that he was afraid of : but he also says that Cain be- 
came a robber and conspired with other men as bad as himself. 
The sixth chapter of Genesis says that the sons of God came 
upon Earth and saw the daughters of men and took them for 
wives, and the progeny were giants. We now want to explain 
how it is that there are so many Jews in the clothing business. 
Moses says tliat when God was about to drive Adam and Eve 
from the garden of Eden, he made them coats of skin to clothe 
their nakedness. This Hebrew God must therefore have been 
a tailor, and that is just the reason why the Jews are so taken 
up with cheap clothing ! We have the evidence of the God of 
the Hebrews, and also that of Moses and Cain, that there were 



THE FLOOD WAS LOCAL. 59 

other people in the world besides Adam and his family. We 
are perfectly willing to concede to the Jews the right to choose 
and to worship any God they may select as their own God ; 
but we, heathen though we be, desire to take no part oiulot in 
such a matter. We have our own God, the Creator of the Uni- 
verse, and his revelation we see, and hear, and feel everywhere 
around us, and this — the physical creation — is for us all-suffi- 
cient, and we confess that we have not room in our minds to 
take in the monstrous assumption that He has at any time been 
in personal communication with a single creature ! Again, we 
are willing to allow that the Jews are the descendants of Adam, 
for we claim our descent from the sixth day creation, well as- 
sured, even by the writings of Moses himself, that there were 
infinitely better people in these early times than the Jews were 
at any period of their history. 

Once more we assert that those whom we call our teachers 
are committing a wholesale breach of trust. It is nonsense, in 
the face of irresistible evidence to the contrary, which lies in 
profusion all around us like manna in the desert, to suppose 
that tliey care one-half as much for genuine Truth as they do 
for the mere loaves and fishes of a worse than wasted temporal 
existence ; and the one thing, and the only thing, left for the 
people to do is to strike out of the old rut and do their own 
thinking, ""rwill be a new business for a great many, but 
with a good will they will get into it as easily as the Jew gets 
into a clothing-store. 

We come now to an interesting part of the history of these 
people as it is written by Moses. It is especially interesting on 
account of recent discoveries which, if they proye anything at 
all, certainly prove that the whole account of the flood given 
by him cannot be warranted to wash — nothing but cheap trash 
— fictitious for the most part. This was to have been expected 
since it is but the emanation of the brain of a man who, from 
all we can learn, could write nothing else but stuff unfitted for 
the dime novel. This man gives a very elaborate account of 
the whole business, beginning with an account of the Lord's 
determination to destroy all flesh from off the face of the earth. 
An exception was made, however, in favor of Noah, as he was 



60 MOSAIC HISTOKY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

the only righteous man living. Quite close upon the narrative 
of the advent of the sons of God (Josephus calls them angels) 
upon Earth when they took the daughters of men as wives, we 
have the account that all flesh had become corrupt : and it is 
seriously intimated that the sons of God — the ^' angels " — had 
corrupted the clear fountain from whence sprang the Jewish 
race ! This would be a hard blow for us if it were our mis- 
fortune to believe that a good tree could bear such bad fruit. 
Josephus— and we need not pause to find a more celebrated 
authority, or one of earlier date — says that the ang«ls came 
down from heaven and corrupted the daughters of men and 
mankind also, and that this is the reason God determined to 
destroy them. *^ And the Lord said, Myspirit shall not always 
strive with man, for that is also flesh, and his days shall be 
one hundred and twenty years." This seems to prove that the 
God of Moses was a God of flesh, for he had sons who were 
flesh, and he says that man is flesh also. From the time of the 
flood to the days of Abraham men lived to a greater age than 
his God said they should : therefore either Moses was wrong or 
his God repented of what he said. But why notice these small 
blunders when we have proof that the whole account is a hum- 
bug ! That there was a local flood there is no doubt ; and that 
there was a man like Noah who saved his family in a boat with 
all his live stock, is also a fact, for slabs have lately been exca- 
vated from the ruins of one of the ancient cities giving a full 
account of this flood at the time. These slabs are now in the 
British Museum in London, and must be noticed in our next 
chapter. 



( 



CHAPTER FIVE. 

THE ASSYRIAN" ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE. 

{F7'om the Baltimore Sun,) 

Messrs. A. S. Abell & Co. : It is difficult in the space at 
my command to give a detailed account of the successful efforts 
of such enthusiastic scholars as Champollion, Crotefend, Kouge, 
Sayce, Brugsch and others to extend our knowledge of the 
language and history of eastern nations — men of supreme Cau- 
casian mind, who, while bowing at the shrines of knowledge in 
ancient Creece, and holding in reverence the immortal names 
of Homer, Herodotus and Xenophon, yet crossed the Helles- 
pont into Asia, to the cradle of the human race on the banks 
of the Euphrates, and from thence to the Nile, thus opening, 
by their investigations of the hieroglyphs and the cuneiform 
character, a book of knowledge which had been unread for two 
thousand years. 

1'he visitor to the British Museum in London, after passing 
through the Egyptian Court and before he enters the hall 
where the Elgin marbles are preserved, will find himself in the 
Assyrian department, and among the bas-reliefs, representing 
sieges and battle scenes, will find twelve stone tablets carved in 
the cuneiform or arrow-headed writing of Assyria. The tablets 
are somewhat broken and defaced, but, through the unwearied 
labor of Oriental scholars, they have been correctly translated. 
These twelve tablets were found in Nineveh, and adorned the 
interior of the palace of King Assurbanipal, who reigned 660 
B. C. They record the adventures of King Izdubar, who 
reigned in Assyria shortly after the flood. The greatest interest 
centres in the eleventh tablet, since it gives an account of the 
deluge, in some respects similar to that given in the Book of 
Gene&is, and also states that this account was copied from a 
(61) 



62 MOSAIC HISTOEY OF THE HEBREWS AiifALYZED. 

similar but more ancient tablet, which was kept in a city of 
Assyria called Erech, probably the most ancient city in the 
world, and from these facts we are compelled to look upon 
these tablets as among the most ancient records now preserved, 
having been written 200 years before the birth of Moses. 

The eleventh tablet states that King Izdubar meets a sailor 
named Urbamsi, and they sail in a ship down the river Eu- 
phrates in search of Sisit, (the Noah of the Assyrians,) of whom 
they have heard, ^' Sisit has escaped the flood and has been 
declared immortal by the gods/^ They meet Sisit, but are 
separated by a stream. At the request of Izdubar Sisit gives 
him an account of the flood, which the Assyrians have handed 
down to posterity, and which we may regard as a rich contri- 
bution to the literature of the present day. The translation 
below is a verbatim translation of the conversation between 
Izdubar and Sisit, in which the latter relates the building of 
an ark or ship, gives an account of the flood, lasting six days, 
after which the ark rested upon a mountain. He first sent 
out a dove, which returned ; then a swallow, and finally a 
raven, which did not return. He then leaves the ark and 
builds an altar to the gods. 

S. B. HOOPMAN. 

Translation : 

Izdubar after this manner said to Sisit afar off : 

^' Sisit, the account do thou tell to me, to the midst to make 
war I come up after thee. 

'' Say how thou hast done it, and in the circle of gods life 
thou hast gained.'' 

Sisit after this manner said to Izdubar : 

^^iVill reveal to thee, Izdubar, the concealed story, and the 
wisdom of the gods I will relate to t-hee. 

^' The city Surippak, the city which thou hast established 
was ancient, and the gods within it. Anu, Bel, Ninip, Lord 
of Hades, their will revealed in the midst, and spake to me 
thus : 

'^ ^ Surippakite, son of Ubaratutu, make thou a great ship 
for thyself. 

^* ^I will destroy the sinners and life. 



THE FLOOD. 63 

'' ' Cause to go in the seed of life all of it, to preserve them. 

*^ ' The ship which thou shalt make, cubits shall be the 

measure of its length, and cubits the amount of its 

breadth and its height. Into the deep launch it.' 

" Into the reckless deep I launched it. 

'* Its planks the water within it admitted. 

*^ I saw breaks and holes. 

"My hands placed three measures of bitumen : I poured 
over the outside ; 

** Three measures of bitumen I poured over the inside. 

"All I possessed I collected it ; all I possessed I collected 
of silver. 

"All I possessed I collected of gold ; 

" All I possessed I collected of the seed of life. 

"■ The whole I caused to go up into the ship ; all my male 
and female servants. 

"The beasts of the field, the animals of the field, and the 
sons of the army, all of them I caused to go up. 

"A flood Shamas made, and — 

" He spake saying, ' In the night I will 'cause it to rain from 
heaven heavily ; 

" ^ Enter to the midst of the ship, and shut thy door.' 

"A flood he raised and spake, saying in the night, ^I will 
cause it to rain from heaven heavily.'' 

" In the day that I celebrated his festival, 

" The day which he had appointed, fear I had. 

" I entered to the midst of the ship, and shut my door ; 

" To guide the ship to Buzursadirabi the pilot. 

" The palace I gave to his hand. 

" The raging of a storm in the morning arose from the hori- 
zon of heaven extending and wide. 

" Vul in the midst of it thundered, 

"And Nebo and Saru went in front ; 

" The destroyer Nergal overturned ; 

"Niuip went in front, and cast down ; 

" The spirits carried destruction ; 

"In their glory they swept the earth ; 

" Of Vul the flood reached to heaven ; 



64 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALYZED. 

'^ The bright earth to a waste was turned ; 

'^ The surface of the earth, like it swept ; 

'^ It destroyed all life from the face of the earth. 

" The strong tempest over the people reached to heaven. 

^' Brother saw not his brother ; it did not spare the people. 

'' In heaven the gods feared the tempest, and sought refuge ; 
they ascended to the heaven of Anu. 

**The gods, like dogs with tails hidden, crouched down. 

^^ Spake Ishtar a discourse ; 

'' Uttered the great goddess her speech : 

^* '^The world to sin has turned, and then I in the presence 
of the gods prophesied evil. 

" ^ When I prophesied in the presence of the gods evil, ; 

**^To evil were devoted all my people: and I prophesied 
thus : 

" ' I have begotten man and let him not like the sons of the 
fishes fill the sea.' 

** The gods concerning the spirits were weeping with her ; 

" The gods in their seats were seated in lamentation ; cov- 
ered were their lips for the coming evil. 

*' Six days and nights passed, the wind, tempest and storm 
overwhelmed. 

^"^On the seventh day in its course, was calmed the storm, 
and all the tempest which had destroyed like an earthquake, 
quieted. 

^' The sea he caused to dry and wind and tempest ended. 

*'I was carried through the sea, the doer of evil, and the 
whole of mankind who turned to sin, like reeds their corpses 
floated . 

*^ I opened the window and the light broke in, over my 
refuge. 

^' I was carried over the shore, at the boundary of the sea. 

''For twelve measures it ascended over the land. To the 
country of Nizir went the ship. 

'^ The mountain of Nizir stopped the ship, and to pass over 
it was not able. 

•^' The first day and the second day, the mountain of Nizir 
the same. 



THE FLOOD. 65 

" The third day and fourth day, the mountain of Nizir the 
same. 

^' The fifth and sixth, the mountain of Nizir the same. 

^' On the seventh day, in the course of it. 

'^ I sent forth a dove, and it left. The dove went and 
searched and a resting place it did not find, and it returned. 

*'I sent forth a swallow and it left. The swallow went and 
searched and a resting place it did not find, and it returned. 

'^I sent forth a raven, and it left. The raven went, and the 
corpses on the water it saw, and it did eat, it swam, and wan- 
dered away, and did not return. 

*^ I sent the animals forth to the four winds. 

" I poured out a libation. 

" I built an altar on the peak of the mountain. 

^' The gods collected at its burning.'' 

These slabs antedate the writings of Moses two hundred 
years. Moses learned all about this flood when he was in Mi- 
dian, and it was part of his plan to embellish it with the pre- 
sence of his God, so as to give the genealogy of the godly Jew 
from Adam to the Exodus. 

These slabs prove that our God had nothing to do with the 
flood, and they further prove that all the account up to Exodus 
is fiction : any one of the present day of ordinary knowledge, 
knows that it would be impossible to submerge the whole 
world. They prove also that the flood was local, as this King 
and his Country were not included, or he would not have been 
seeking information. 

We quote the following : 

*^In New York Sunday evening Dr. Boynton spoke on * The 
Deluge in the Light of Science.' He began with a quotation 
from St. Paul which tells us to believe all things. Dr. Boynton 
does not believe in this manner. He pins his faith on invest- 
igating all things. He classified the deluge with the expedition 
for the Golden Fleece and other classical legends of ancient 
history, and treated its traditional place in history as virtually 
a myth. He conceded that a substratum of truth might have 
underlain this great legend of the flood, inasmuch as there was 
undoubtedly an extensive flood in the southern portion of 



66 MOSAIC HISTOEY OE THE. HEBREWS AN"ALYZED. 

Babylon. It probably embodied, in tlie doctor's opinion, a 
great physical change that came over the globe, and which 
perhaps was the cause of the migration of the people. Dr. 
Boynton arrived at these results from examination of the fossil 
remains and the most recent geological investigations. 

'^ The doctor will hardly succeed, however, in getting people 
to dismiss for ever Noah's beloved and familiar ark, with all 
the animals in it, together with all the other cherished para- 
phernalia of the deluge.^' 

We quote also the following : 

'' They made one door and one little window in the ark. 
Noah did not need fresh air. The old man and his menagerie 
could get along without that. Then he took in 1,500 snakes, 
about 12,000 or 15,000 mammals and mastodons, polar bears 
from the Arctics, and ostriches from Patagonia, some 1,100,000 
bugs ; all the things that crawl, and a great deal more that 
must have given old Noah a great deal of trouble. The flood 
was fifteen cubits above Ohimborazo, where the condor sat 
29,000 feet towards the skies, with 15,000 feet of solid ice un- 
der him. How deep was it ? Only about 25,000 feet deep in 
portions. How was that for dampness ! If you don't believe 
it, you'll burn eternally in hell fire." 

From the time of Noah, in the history as written by Moses, 
to the time of Abraham there is a gap of about three hundred 
years. 'T is strange that Moses could not find some other 
divine matter to fill in this space ! Yes, there was the tower 
of Babel, where he says the different languages were made. 

We now come to his trump card, the first real circumcised 
Jew, Abram, who became Abraham by promotion from his 
God, who stuck a ham to his name, notwithstanding which the 
Jews do not eat pork. Abraham married his sister, who at 
the age of ninety years gave birth to Isaac — that is, Moses 
says so. 

Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob be- 
gat the so-called patriarchs. These godly sons were about to 
kill their brother Joseph, who was the best one of the lot, but 
changed their minds and sold him into slavery. Judah, the 
principal one, got his daughter-in-law with child, who was 



ABRAHAM THE TRUMP CARD. 67 

Pharez, one of the genealogical vstream, a bastard begotten of a 
harlot. Reuben, the oldest one, dishonored his father by co- 
habiting with his father's concubine, and lost his birth right ; 
four of the others were bastards, and all of the so-called patri- 
archs are the godly stream from which this godly people sprung. 
And God said unto Abraham, ^^ I will give unto thee and to 
thy seed after thee, all the I>and of Canaan for an everlasting 
possession, and I will be their God ; for all the land which thou 
seest, to thee will I give it and to thy seed for ever.'^ Here is 
another time that their God backs out and does not keep his 
promise, for they worshipped other gods more than they did 
this God, and they have not been in possession for the last two 
thousand years. There are many more passages in which this 
God promises and swears to do certain things that are never 
done ; they were also to have all the land from the river Eu- 
phrates to the land of Egypt, which they did not get until after 
five hundred years from the time of Moses, and then only for 
a short time under David. 

Abraham is the Hero of Moses' fiction, for he makes him a 
big Indian who is said to have entertained God under a tree in 
pic-nic style ; he brought water and washed God's feet, and 
then ordered Sarah to make some sweet cakes ; killed a fatted 
calf, and had a nice time with God and the two angels. After 
they had eaten their fill, God made a confidant of Abraham, 
and told him that they were a Committee come down from 
heaven to find out if all was true that had been reported about 
Sodom and Gomorrah, and if so they intended to destroy the 
two cities ; and after Abraham had given God the desired in- 
formation, and walked along with God to show him the way, 
Abraham caused God to change his mind and say that if there 
were ten good people in these places they would be spared, but 
it turned out that Lot and his family were the only good ones. 

In this age of intelligence we can safely imagine that our 
God was never revealed to man personally. Our God never 
promises, never swears, never changes His mind, never repents 
of what is done, never blunders, never makes a mistake; our 
God is truth and love ; all the people in the world are His 
creatures and there is no distinction made of any. All the 



68 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS Aiq-ALYZED. 

account written by Moses up to Exodus is fiction, pure and 
simple. The account tliat Moses gives of the Creation is so 
supremely ridiculous that any ordinary mind can realize the 
silliness of it. Science tells us that the Planet Jupiter, which 
we know to have existed for thousands of years, is not suffici- 
ently cooled to be inhabitable, therefore the Earth must have 
existed for the same period before there were any people upon 
the face of it. Our God, th^ Great Creator, does nothing by 
magic but only by the slow process of Nature's Laws. World 
making has been going on for millions of years, and is still 
going on. 

God made Nature's Laws, and they are accomplishing His 
will. It is a known fact that our world is composed of the 
most minute particles, which are formed in space by the gases 
that we know to exist there ; these particles in course of time 
are formed into solid matter, or Rock ; a body of gaseous fire 
is sent by the power of the Laws of Nature through this field 
of solid matter, and collects these particles around this ball of 
fire, and this constitutes the outer crust of an incipient world, 
just as ours was, and is. 

Science tells us that this world revolved around the Sun for 
thousands of years before there was water or soil suitable 
for growing herbs, grass or trees, and after that came the 
human family. 

Instead of the Earth being made to appear out of the water^ 
as Moses tells us, the water was an after consideration. Some 
suppose that the living things were the product from the ani- 
malcula in the water ; but that is all a mystery that has not 
been solved by us weak mortals. 

Moses was a great man in his day and generation, but for 
the present age his writings will not bear criticism. We have 
many thousands of uninspired writers who can beat him in 
writijig history or fiction, notwithstanding he pretends to have 
been in close intercourse with God, 

The following we quote from Rev. Mr. Schonfarber : 

'^ The Bible gives us the six-day creation story. There be 
those in our time who try to make these days periods or ages 
such as was not intended by the scriptural writer. Some of us 



''MYTHICAL STORIES.'' G9 

are beginning to realize that creation has not yet ceased. Many 
cling to the impossible and improbable simply because it is 
found in the supposed word of God. 

'' But it is not our intention to reflect upon the motives of 
these early writers, because their thoughts were as real and 
natural to them as are the conceptions of the most rational 
scientists. 

''Yet, I can but wonder how men in this advanced age can 
still cling to the mythical stories of the hoary past, simply be- 
cause they are taught in the Bible, a book we greatly reverence 
for its lofty and sublime ethical precepts, but whose scientific 
statements can find scant lodgment in our minds. Jt is diffi- 
cult to understand how one can believe in the rib story, the 
talking serpent, the universal deluge myth ; in fact, all the 
statements in the Bible that run counter to the postulates of 
reason. This book should be looked upon in the same light 
as other books. It is nought else but the production of differ- 
ent men at different times. It often reflects the thoughts of 
primitive men. It is not free from error. The infallibility 
that some would ascribe to it, can be given to God alone, not to 
any of His children. The miracles that have been recorded 
upon its pages, if they were related as having happened in this 
day and time, would not be believed, because we have now 
learned that Nature is governed by fixed laws. Was it different 
years ago ? And should we give our minds in slavish obedience 
to what must be laughed at merely because it has found a place 
in a book which is supposed to have been written under the 
special guidance of God ? " 

The above quotation is part of a sermon preached by a Jew- 
ish Rabbi ; it helps to prove that the writings of Moses were 
not inspired. They were nothing more than the writings of 
any other man, and they were written for the Jews only, for 
their own personal use as a history. We have taken the liberty 
of quoting from this sermon as it concurs with many of the 
theories advanced in these pages. The writings of Moses in- 
culcate the idea that his God did not know or understand what 
the Jewish character was when they left their bondage, (and 
no doubt he was right, for, according to his writings, his God 



70 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AI^-ALTZED. 

was a very weak God). He thought they would be a good and 
obedient nation and worship him only. Their God, like Moses, 
was very vain and ambitious and wanted to be worshipped and 
honored just the same as Moses did, but they were both wofully 
disappointed : for when he (his God) got them out of Egypt 
he found that they were a stiff-necked set of people, and he let 
his passion get the better of him and wanted to kill them all, 
and Moses, that great mythical impostor, had to pacify him by 
showing how ridiculous he would appear to all the heathen, and 
how they would laugh at him. This representation of Moses 
seems to have had the desired effect, for he did not mind the 
Jewish disobedience so much as the idea of being laughed at 
by the heathen. This God therefore determined to stick to tlie 
Jews for better or for worse, and it all turned out for worse. 
The Jews repudiated him and he lost his personality, for he 
disappeared from view when the Jews left Mount Sinai, and 
nothing more is heard of his mightiness until he was resur- 
rected by the Levites in the Land of Canaan for their own 
personal benefit. 

There is a very singular trait in the human character, and 
that is, people dbn^t mind being humbugged. They seem to 
prefer a doubtful truth to a real fact: Barnum, the great 
showman, is authority on this assertion. If Moses had believed 
in future reward, we could then believe that he was serving 
God, but he had n® such idea, therefore he was only seeking 
selfish, material advantages, in which he only succeeded to a 
small degree. But there is one thing he got that he had no 
idea of, that is, immortality. He is still worshipped by a very 
large number of the inhabitants of the Earth. His ambition 
was to become a King, in which he did not succeed, but he be- 
came greater than any king that ever lived upon Earth : he 
made himself Lord Moses, surrounded himself with Princes 
and Nobles, such as they were, mostly of the tribe of Levi, and 
he laid a very heavy tax on all the other tribes to support his 
Court ; all the first-born of the people and the animals that 
were not edible had to be redeemed, and all the firstlings of 
the edible animals belonged to the priesthood and their at- 
tendants. He also levied a heavy tax in gold and silver and 



WHAT DID THE CATTLE EAT? 71 

fine stuffs, and he required one-tenth of the accretion of the 
land. All this is what caused the Jews to rebel against him, 
and he was dej)osed from power. He does not tell us all this, 
but by studying the whole account that he does give us we can 
very justly come to this conclusion. There is one God whom 
we know that the Jews always, in all their history, worshipped 
with the greatest devotion, and that is the mighty dollar, and 
for anyone to interfere with that god is to interfere with their 
most sensitive point and nature, and there is where Moses 
made a most grievous mistake in being a little too previous in 
all these requirements. 

When the Jews left Egypt, Moses tells us that they had very 
much cattle, flocks and herds. For four million people there 
must have been at least one million of these. He also tells us 
the people were fed on manna and quail, but he forgot to tell 
us what the animals were fed on. And then again, the water 
question is another serious blunder : for when the people cried 
for water he smote the Rock of Horeb and says they got a sup- 
ply. Now, as the Jewish Camp must have covered more than 
one hundred miles square, just imagine the people of Baltimore 
running down to Washington with buckets for water for the 
cattle and family purposes, and you have a picture of that im- 
probable event. In reading all these Munchausen stories, if 
the people would only stop and think, and study the whole 
matter, they would see the absurdity of the whole account. 

If Moses and the other Jewish writers could have foreseen 
that their writings would be handed down to so many genera- 
tions, and also have seen the advance of Science and intelli- 
gence, they would have been more particular in their accounts, 
but they had no such thoughts ; they wrote for the time being, 
not knowing that hundreds of millions of intelligent people 
would criticise their writings. The most difficult thing to un- 
derstand in the writings of Moses is why he should have writ- 
ten so many untruthful things. The whole of his narrative is 
one big Lie. Here is one of them, and we could give fifty more 
if necessary. He says the children of Israel did eat Manna 
forty years until they came to a land inhabited, they did eat 
Manna until they came unto the border of the Land of Canaan. 
We know this to be an untruth, for, as we have shown before, 



72 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

when they left Mount Sinai they took a westerly course across 
the Desert and struck that part of the Land of Canaan that 
was afterward occupied by the tribe of Judah, and with the 
exception of having crossed the Desert twice, they were not in 
the Desert at all. Recent discoveries have demonstrated all 
this, just as they have in regard to his account of the flood. 

If Moses had written for posterity we could better appreciate 
it, but we know that it was all self with him, and therefore 
most of the writing that he is credited with must have been 
written by other persons a long time after the time of Moses. 
We have heretofore charged Moses and the Jews with having 
committed a great many outrages during their perigrination 
around the Desert, and some of our readers will want to know 
how we know this. Well, we are are about to show that they 
were the most god-forsaken set of wretches that ever existed. 
In all the history of the world there is nothing to compare 
with the atrocities committed by this blood-thirsty set of rob- 
bers, cut-throats, pirates, freebooters and — O' ! shade of 
Webster, give us words that will suit as names for these sava- 
ges. We have tried in vain to find the word, but there is none 
to suit the emergency ; we will therefore have to satisfy our- 
selves by giving the narrative and let the readers judge for 
themselves. We allude to the blood-curdling account they 
give of their treatment of the Midianites I Had the devils from 
Hell (if there is such a place) with all their myriads of evil 
spirits been let loose upon Earth to hold a Carnival of Blood 
and rapine, they could not have surpassed the blood-curdling 
outrages that were committed by these Jews on those who were 
their best friends and a thousand times better people in every 
respect than the savage, ignorant, idolatrous and thieving Jews. 
Moses is given the credit of ordering these outrages, but we 
disbelieve this, for Moses was connected with the Midianites by 
ties of blood, and was indebted to them for most of his success 
in all his history. It was they who taught him of a great God, 
but this knowledge he perverted to his self-aggrandizement. It 
was they who gave him the facilities for gaining all the infor- 
mation that enabled him to write the Book of Genesis, and 
also some of Leviticus ; it was they who helped him in his need 
when he was a fugitive from justice ; it was they who helped 



MOSES DRAGGED AHOUKD THE DESERT, 73 

him to return to Egypt to make himself a Lord and an un- 
crowned King ; it was they who met him in the wilderness and 
gave him good advice and assistance there ; they were the only 
friends that the Jews ever had in all their history, from Exodus 
to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. 

When Jethro, the priest of Midian, heard all that the 
Lord had done for Moses and the Jews, he took his daughter, 
the wife of Moses, and her two sons, to the Mount of God, 
and Moses went out to meet him, and kissed him, and when 
Moses told his falher-in-law all that the Lord had done for 
tliem, Jethro rejoiced for all the goodness which the Lord had 
done for them, and said, '' Blessed be the Lord who hath de- 
livered you out of the hand of the Egyptians ; now I know that 
the Lord is the greatest of all Grods,'' and he took a burnt 
offering and sacrificed unto God. Aaron and the Elders came 
and did. eat bread with Jethro before God. When Jethro left 
the Jewish camp, one of his sons remained to assist them with 
his experience in traveling in and around the Desert, but he 
became so disgusted with their conduct that he determined to 
leave them also, and Moses said unto him, ** We are journeying 
to the place the Lord hath given us, come thou with us and we 
will do thee good.^' And Hobab answered and said, "1 will 
not go. '^ And Moses said, ^' Leave us not I pray thee, for 
thou wilt be eyes unto us in our journey through the wilder- 
ness.'' And he answered and said, '^ I will return to my own 
Land and kindred.'" And Moses said, ^' Whatever goodness 
that the Lord shall do unto us, the same shall we do unto 
thee." This quotation is given from their Bible to show how 
well they kept their word. When the Jews left the Mount of 
God, as Moses calls it, he had lost all power and control of 
them ; they took him along, -not as a leader, but a follower. 
They crossed in the most direct course to the land afterward 
occupied by the tribe of Judah, and it may have been their 
first intention to stay there, but findingthat there was so much 
booty to be had by traveling through, they continued on and 
also through the Land that was afterward occupied by the 
tribe of Simeon, to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. There 
can be no doubt but that they were murdering and robbing 
the inhabitants as they went along. And we here call attention 



74 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

to the fact that Moses tells us, after this, that he was denied 
the privilege of entering into the Promised Land, by the Lord, 
and that he was taken up on Mount Pisgah and only allowed 
to view the Land from a distance ; all of which is rank un- 
truthfulness, as far as the received idea that it was God the 
Great Creator that he was in communication with. It was his 
own God that he had established on Mount Sinai, and exhib- 
ited to Aaron and the Elders, just as curiosities and monstros- 
ities are shown at the present day in dime museums. We say 
this now without fear of contradiction, for we know that they 
were in that land which they called the Promised Land before 
they crossed over the river Jordan. They left the Mount and 
disappeared from view for thirty-eight years, all of which time 
Moses does not give one word of what they were doing or where 
they were staying : he only says that they were wandering in 
the wilderness, and this we know to be improbable, impossible 
and untruthful. Some part of these thirty-eight years they 
were in that very country that they afterwards occupied and 
would not allow Moses to re-enter it with them. As we have 
said before, they turned when they left the Land of Canaan 
and traveled along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, all of 
which was a rich and wealthy country, with some large cities 
on its sea shore, and they were no doubt robbing and murder- 
ing as they went. When they got to what is now the Isthmus 
of Suez, they turned again towards the Ked Sea, and traveled 
along the shore of the sea for the second time, aud continued 
in that direction until they got to the head of the Gulf of 
Abaka, and there they encamped, being now in the neighbor- 
hood of the Land of Bdom. When they left they took a west- 
erly course to Mount Hor, where Aaron died and was buried. 
They then went through the Land of Edom until they got to 
the Land of the Amorites and the Midianites, and here they 
encamped again, and it was here that they committed that 
most blood-curdling outrage that there is any account of. No 
doubt they had done the same several times before, while tra- 
veling about eighteen hundred miles around the country. But 
of this they are silent ; and why they give the matter of Baal- 
peor, as they term it, is hard to understand, for this atrocity 
stamps them as the most infamous set of savages that we have 



BALAAM THE PROPHET OF GOD. 75 

any account of in all the world's history. The whole thirty- 
eight years were spent in a country of fulness and plenty ; and 
when they got to the country of the Amorites and the Midian- 
ites they created the greatest consternation among the people, 
for they knew of the atrocities that they had been committing, 
and feared the same fate, for their numbers were irresistible. 
These people were not idolaters as represented by Moses, but 
worshipped God, for it was they who taught Moses of the exist- 
ence of a Supreme Being : they not only believed in God, but 
had a real prophet among them. This fact is vouched for by 
Moses himself, and there is no voucher for Moses or any other 
of the Jewish prophets. The King of the Amorites sent for 
Balaam to curse this horde of savages, knowing that no earthly 
force that they could command would avail them. On his way 
to the camp, Balaam was met by an Angel of God and told 
what to do. When he came in sight of the Jewish encampment 
and saw their numbers he knew that they were irresistible, and 
he therefore blessed them, as he had been instructed by God 
and the Angel. For this good act of kindness toward them he 
was murdered in cold blood. The Midianites tried to be 
friendly, showed them every kindness in their power, and made 
every effort to renew their former friendship for Moses and the 
Jews, but there were two misfortunes attended them — one was 
that their women were better looking than the Jews, and the 
other was that they possessed a great deal of wealth. And, as 
the Jews were not just then practising the Ten Commandments 
one of which says " Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's pro- 
perty," they therefore determined to do as they had been doing 
for forty years, that is, kill them all except the virgins, and 
then — there being no heirs — of course, the good Jews being in 
possession, would be the owners. But the question was, how 
to pick a quarrel with them, as they were on such friendly 
terms ; but '' Where there is a will there is always a way," so 
the Jews took the following plan to break off their intercourse 
with the Midianites : the priests commenced by complaining 
that the women were leading all the innocent men astray and 
teaching them to worship false gods : this was the truth, for 
the Midianites worshipped the Great God, and the Jews wor- 
shipped the God of Moses and the God of Mammon. 



CHAPTER SIX. 



THE MASSACRE OF THE MIDIANITES, 

THE TENTH Commandment issued by Moses for the 
guidance of the Jews says, " Thou shalt not covet thy neigh- 
bor's house, nor his wife, his man servant, his maid servant, 
nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's/' 
The Midianites were not only neighbors but relatives of Moses ; 
their land adjoined what became the Land of Canaan, on the 
easternmost side, and, notwithstanding it was not part of the 
Promised Land, they were all butchered in cold blood. Moses 
tells us that the Lord said, ^^ Avenge the children of Israel of 
the Midianites in the matter of Baal-peor/' Now what was 
this matter of Baal-peor ? Here it is. One of the Jewish 
Princes (so called by Moses) took a Princess of the Midianites 
for his wife, she being much more desirable than any of the 
Jewish Princesses, (save the mark). He brought her to his 
tent, and just about this time the innocent Jews were all shed- 
ding tears at their tent doors for the sin of their fellow saints, 
and they felt so outraged at the sight of this gross sin that they 
hid their faces for shame ; and one of the high officials of the 
Levites followed the two to their tent, and, running a spear 
through them both, pinned them to the earth ! For this brave 
act he was highly applauded by Moses and the Lord. Moses, 
it is said, then ordered Joshua to select one thousand cut- 
throats from each tribe, making twelve thousand butchers. 
Even the tribe of Levi who were holy unto the Lord, furnished 
their quota in this hellish outrage. They then went among the 
Midianites and butchered one hundred and seventy thousand 
of them, reserving the virgins. They also spared all the good 
looking females, as there was only thirty-two thousand virgins. 
But when they returned to camp with their spoils, Moses was 
(76) 



A JEWISH BLESSIKG. 77 

again angry with them that they had spared any of these 
females, and he therefore ordered them to be killed. Some of 
these women brought their children along, and this is the order 
that Moses gave — ^'Now, therefore, kill every male among the 
little ones/' 

When the division of the spoils took place there were seventy- 
two virgins set aside as the portion of the Lord. Can any one 
read this portion of the Jewish history without feeling the 
utmost disgust and contempt for such an order as coming from 
the Great Creator? Our readers are asked to examine this 
passage of the Jew's Bible, and satisfy themselves as to the 
correctness of it : it will be found in the thirty-first chapter of 
Numbers, and they will find that it is not only not exaggerated 
but justice has not been done it. The spoils that they got by 
this butchery consisted of six hundred and seventy-five thou- 
sand sheep, seventy-two thousand beeves, sixty thousand asses, 
thirty-two thousand virgins ; also every man had jewels of gold, 
chains, bracelets, rings, ear-rings, and tablets and fine stuifs. 
What we want to call particular attention to, in corroboration 
of our assertion that they were butchers and cut-throats, is, 
that when they returned to camp not one man was missing : 
showing conclusively that there was no fighting, but simply a 
butchery. And this was the matter of Baal-peor, all brought 
about by a Jew taking a wife from the Midianites, who was a 
thousand times better than himself or any other Jew. 

Here is another one of the lies written by Moses. The 
twelfth chapter of Genesis, third verse, says, '^Arid I will bless 
them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee : and in 
thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.*' The priest of 
Midian not only blessed them, but was their very best friend. 
The prophet Balaam also blessed them and in return they got 
a Jewish blessing that they had been dispensing for forty years 
and have been dispensing from that time to this ; and so far 
from being a blessing to the other nations of the earth, they 
have always been, and are yet, a nuisance to every nation that 
they intrude upon. 

Any persons who can think that these wretches were favored 
by God, the Great Creator, or that He had anything to do with 



78 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AKALYZED. 

them, have no christian feeling or christian principles, for 
they must entertain a very poor opinion of their heavenly 
Father ; as we also know that the blessings of Grod, like the 
dews from above, fall alike on all of his creatures, both Jew 
and Gentile. 

Moses was not only a sinner himself, but was conceived in 
sin, for his father married his own aunt : she was, therefore, 
not only Moses' mother, but his grand aunt also. Moses ordered 
the Jews to make a mercy seat with two cherubims of pure 
gold, one looking toward the other. What was the use of a 
mercy seat to them when they were never known to show any 
mercy to any during their whole history ? Very particular at- 
tention is called to the following passage in the Laws of Moses. 
The twenty-fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, 16th verse, says, 
*' The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither 
shall the children be put to death for the fathers : every man 
shall be put to death for his own sin.'^ 

The Book of Joshua, seventh chapter, verses 20tli, 21st, 24th 
and 25th, says, ^^And Achan answered Joshua, and said, In- 
deed I have sinned against the Lord Grod of Israel, and thus 
and thus have I done. When I saw among the spoils a goodly 
Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a 
wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, 
and took them, and behold, they are hid in the Earth in the 
midst of my tent, and the silver under it. 

" And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son 
of Zerah, and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of 
gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his 
asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had : and 
they brought them unto the valley of Achor. And all Israel 
stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they 
had stoned them with stones/' 

Achan's sin did not consist in taking these articles, but in 
not delivering them to the Priests ; he was the only sinner, but 
all of his family were put to a cruel death for his sin. 

When the Jews became settled in the Land of Canaan they 
became very unruly to the priests, for they saw that it was 
much cheaper to worship a god of stone and metal than it was 



NO RESPECT FOR THE LAWS. 79 

to support the God of the Levites ; they therefore went after 
false gods, as Moses called them, but they were the gods that 
they were always accustomed to worship and it came natural 
to them. 

As an evidence of the brutality and barbarism of the Jews, 
they had only been in the Land of Canaan a short time when 
they commenced fighting among themselves, and the tribe of 
Benjamin was almost annihilated : they killed all the tribe ex- 
cept six hundred men, not sparing the women and children, 
the aged or infirm, and they after this had to steal from among 
strangers women for this remnant as wives, as they had sworn 
not to give them any of their females. 

Another evidence of their brutality is given in Judges, the 
eighteenth chapter, 7th verse. " Then the five men departed, 
and came to Laish, and saw the people that were therein, how 
they dwelt careless, after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet 
and secure ; and there was no magistrate in the land, that 
might put them to shame in any thing ; and they were far 
from the Zidonians, and had no business with any man.^^ 1'hey 
came to Laish unto a people that were quiet and secure, and 
they smote them with the edge of the sword and burnt the city 
with fire, and there was no deliverer. Here was a people who 
were living in peace and contentment, with no thought of 
danger, who were set upon by these six hundred robbers and 
pirates and all murdered m cold blood ; and, as Moses says in 
Deuteronomy, sixth chapter and 11th verse, they got " Houses 
full of all good things, which thou filledstnot, and wells digged 
which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive-trees, which thou 
planted st not ; when thou shalt have eaten and be full.^^ Here 
was a people called heathens who were a thousand times better 
than these cut-throats and robbers who claimed to be the people 
of God, murdered in cold blood for their possessions ! 

We will now give some more quotations from the Jewish 
Books to show their inconsistency and ungodly spirit. Deut- 
eronomy, seventh chapter, 2nd verse, says, ^^And when the 
Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite 
them and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant 
with them, nor shew mercy unto them.'' Chapter fourth^ 



80 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS a:N^ALYZED. 

verse 31st, says, *^ (For the Lord thy God is a merciful God ;) 
He will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the 
covenant of thy fathers, which He sware unto them/^ Chapter 
thirteenth, verses 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th, say, " If thy brother, 
the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife 
of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice 
thee secretly, saying, ' Let us go and serve other gods,' which 
thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers ; Namely, of the 
gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, 
or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto 
the other end of the earth ; Thou shalt not consent unto him, 
nor hearken unto him ; neither shall thine eye pity him, 
neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him : But 
thou shalt surely kill him ; thy hand shall be first upon him to 
put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people/' 
This Law was made in the interest of the tribe of Levi and to 
support the Priesthood, for if the people worshipped other gods 
they would stop paying the very burdensome taxes that were 
levied upon them, and this would interfere with the Priests' 
bread and meat. 

The tribe of Levi were mostly responsible for the trouble 
that befel the Jews : they would allow them to be defeated 
by their enemies in battle, when they could have prevented it 
by prudence on their part, just to say that it was the Lord who 
punished them for not paying their taxes : for most of the 
chief officers belonged to that tribe, and they could by their 
influence cause the above result, and this is what caused the 
final disruption of the ten tribes from the tribe bf Judah who 
were ruled by the Priests and Levites. 

Moses tells us in his writings all about the creation of the 
world ; he tells us what God did, and what God said, and also 
the very thoughts of the Creator. Now, had he represented 
himself as one of the sons of God come down upon the Earth 
to redeem and liberate the Jews from their servitude, there 
would have been some show or probability of his possessing all 
this knowledge in regard to Divine matters, but he had not 
acquired the more modern ideas, and therefore his whole pro- 
ject fell through, or failed, from his not claiming enough. 
Instead of claiming Divinity, he tells all about his ancestry, 



POWER BEHIND THE THRONE. 81 

beginning with Adam, down to his own father who married 
his aunt, wliich is a forbidden degree according to Moses' own 
Laws. The whole of the genealogy from commencement to 
end is a dirty, disreputable stream. 

One of the Commandments said to have been written by the 
finger of God, says, ^' Thou shalt not commit adultery/' Just 
as well tell the Jews, Thou shalt not eat : for they lived more 
like animals than human beings. Another injunction, ^*Thou 
shalt not steal.'' Why, they were natural born thieves and 
were stealing all the time, and their whole dependence was in 
stealing. The next injunction, " Thou shalt not bear false 
witness." There is no wonder that Moses could not impress 
his laws on the Jews : for, to make laws effective, the maker 
of them should set the example by respecting them and also by 
practising them. Now, in violation of this last injunction, 
Moses was the most conspicuous, for he was a falsifier from the 
commencement to the end. We could produce hundreds of 
his falsehoods if necessary ; but there is one we will call atten- 
tion to. Moses lied when he said he had personal communica- 
tion with God the Great Creator : the Supreme Being had 
nothing whatever to do with Moses or his Laws — the Jews 
treated them with the utmost contempt. 



F 



CHAPTER SEVEN. 

THE SABBATH, 

THE JEWS knew nothing of the Sabbath day until they 
were instructed by Moses, nor is there a particle of evidence 
that any one else knew or ever heard of it until the exodus of 
the Jews from Egypt. 

We quote as follows from Rev. Mr. Schonfarber : 

^' The creation has not yet ceased, and God never rests : 
therefore, I cannot believe that He ever issued the comm^ind 
that man must rest on the seventh day. To me the idea is 
childish. It is the Santa Claus story repeating itself. God 
never revealed himself to man in these words. In fact, I do 
not believe He ever spoke to man as I am now speaking to you, 
and, furthermore, I doubt whether those who place such great 
importance in the seventh day as the day of rest, believe that 
the Eternal Father ever addressed any of His children by word 
of mouth. Such truths have been uttered not only by men of 
Biblical times, but by men of our own day, and the latter are 
as much inspired as the former. 

'^ That man must rest one day in seven is a human necessity. 
That he should set apart one day out of seven whereon to think 
of higher and loftier things than the everyday affairs of life, 
this we believe as firmly as does the veriest dogmatist or ortho- 
dox believer of to-day. To us the important thing is what we 
put into the day. A Sunday that leads us out into noble and 
godlike acts comes nearer to our heart than a Saturday that 
draws us to mean, low and sordid deeds. A Sunday that we 
can give wholly to a contemplation of lofty and spiritual mat- 
ters is as good to us as a Saturday on which we are engaged 
in mercantile pursuits, where all questions touching God are 
conspicuously absent, 
(83) 



KEV. MR. SCHOXFARBER. 83 

^' We should not fear to cull out the miraculous that appears 
in the olden book, and walk along the paths that nature has 
made. She tells us there can be n© infringement on her terri- 
tory ; that God is in her and working through her. When 
once nature ceases to act in accordance with the eternal laws 
mapped out for her in the beginning, death and destruction 
must follow. She is infallible — not the Bible. With her a 
miracle is impossible, law and order being the ever-recurring 
melody of her rythmic motion. With fearless intrepidity, then, 
and not with trembling submissiveness, should we approach 
the child beliefs of the past, as laid down in the good Book, 
and when it tells us that our Father, after creating the world 
in six days, rested on the seventh, and, therefore, man should 
also rest on that day, let us fearlessly express the conviction 
that fills our minds.'' 

We have here given a quotation from a sermon by the Rev. 
Mr. Schonfarber, a Jewish Rabbi. Coming from such a source 
we think it is almost conclusive evidence that we are right, 
not only in this particular, but in most of the others. If the 
Sabbath was instituted by God, as Moses tells us, why was it 
not observed by all the other Nations who knew of the exist- 
ence of the Almighty Being? 

The Egyptians were a thousand times more advanced in 
knowledge than the Jews were, and believed in God, and yet 
they knew nothing of a Sabbath. The Canaanites, the Midian- 
ites andx the Amorites, all believed the same, yet there is no 
evidence that they knew anything of the institution of the 
Sabbath by the Great Creator. It is not the Sabbath that we 
object to, but the claim put forth by the egotistical Jews, who 
say that it was instituted for them alone ; there is no doubt 
that it was invented by Moses to subserve the interests of the 
Priests and Levites, and them only. 

Moses was an Egyptian by birth and only a Jew by descent ; 
in principle, education and religion, he was strictly an Egypt- 
ian ; he was only a Jew in ambition. 

We have heretofore accepted the theory, from reading the 
Jewish Bible, that the institution of circumcision was peculiar 
only to the Jews : but there is evidence now that this ceremony 



84: MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

was practised by the Egyptians before it was by the Jews. If 
this is so, of which there appears to be no doubt, then the 
whole of the writings of Moses, previous to Exodus, are rank 
fiction, pure and simple. 

Our teachers and the Commentators on the Bible do not 
always show honesty of purpose in their explanations, when 
they get puzzled over some of those passages in the Bible that 
are beyond their ken : they say they are allegorical or tradi- 
tional, and sometimes they construe them into poems, or any- 
thing else to hide their own ignorance of the meaning. All 
this is very confusing to ordinary readers, but in the near fu- 
ture they will realize that the present generation is rising above 
such subterfuge. As a histor_y the Jewish Bible is very accept- 
able, but as Divinity it is trash. 

Josephus, who, besides being a celebrated Jewish writer, was 
a Priest of the tribe of Levi, translated the Jewish writings for 
the Romans in the first century of the Christian Era. The 
same task was performed by the Seventy Jewish Scribes for the 
Greeks, three hundred years before. Josephus Avas taken to 
Rome for this especial purpose, though had it not been for his 
eminent learning he would have been a prisoner as many of 
his people were. 

In writing his book for the Romans (which is still a standard 
work) he frequently has to apologize and sometimes explain the 
blunders and mistakes made by Moses : whether he drew upon 
his imagination, or had access to some information which we 
do not possess, is a mystery, for he tells us many things that 
do not appear in our Bible. Moses says the Jews were in Egypt 
four hundred and thirty years, Josephus says two hundred and 
fifteen years. Be that as it may, one thing is certain, they 
were there long enough to lose all their identity, and they had 
no knowledge whatever as to their ancestors or where they ori- 
ginally came from. There is no doubt whatever but that they 
were taken to Egypt at different times either as captives or 
slaves, just as the negro was brought to this country. Accord- 
ing to the account, the Jews were in Egypt about the same pe- 
riod of time that the negroes have now been in this country. 
They only numbered about four millions, while our negroes 



WE WANT A MOSES. 85 

number eight millions. But ours were being brought here 
during this whole period of time. Perhaps in the future some 
Moses will make his appearance among our people of African 
descent and tell them all about their ancestors, and give them 
the assurance that God is with them, and will lead them to a 
land in Africa that is flowing with milk, honey and cotton, 
and then we will certainly have a millennium in these United 
States of America, by the removal of this incubus. Then, if 
some real Jew Moses would only spring up and induce all the 
Jews in this country to emigrate to that Holy Land that for- 
merly flowed with milk and honey, what a real God^s blessing 
it would be to us all — but we should certainly fe«l sorry for 
their neighbors. 

In an article in the Westminster Keview, the Kev. Walter 
Lloyd discredits the claim of the '' inspired^^ writers of the Old 
Testament. ^^They were long credited with clairvoyance,^' he 
says, or, " with the power to have seen things which had hap- 
pened before the advent of the human race upon the earth, or 
whi(,'h had occurred in the unrecorded history of early man, or 
which were to occur in the future. But this is just the claim 
that criticism has demolished. They had no such exceptional 
knowledge, and where they pretended to have it their cosmo- 
gony and. their history are almost invariably wrong. The ap- 
plication of our principle to the literature of the Old Testament 
would leave very little of it with a claim to inspiration. The 
whole of the historical and legislative portions might be dis- 
missed en bloc, and only portions of the remainder, which con- 
tain elevated moral and religious ideas of undoubted service to 
mankind, could be classed as inspired.'' Then we are told 
that religious teachers who are wise ^^will cease to stake their 
position and influence upon unhistoric narratives, primitive 
religious institutions, childish conceptions of the universe 
formed by unscientific minds, and will care only to preserve 
and use such moral and religious truths as will contribute to 
the moral and religious advancement of mankind, and in pur- 
suing this course they will not care what 'sacred' literature 
they may reject as worthless, or what ' profane' literature they 
may recognize as inspired." 



86 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

We have given our opinion very freely in regard to the Jews, 
we will now give the opinion of their Grod, and see how the 
two agree. Thirty-second chapter of Exodus, 9th and 10th 
verses say, ^^And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this 
people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people : Now therefore 
let me alone that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that 
I may consume them : and I will make of thee a great nation/' 
Moses does not tell us how many wives and children he had at 
this time, and, being a feeble old man, it was rather late in life 
for him to commence to manufacture a new nation ; beside, 
God had sworn repeatedly to bring the Jews to a land flowing 
with milk and honey ; it would not do for his God to forswear 
himself, therefore, Moses fell down on his knees and begged 
the Lord not to do so foolish a thing, for the heathen would 
hear of it and they would laugh at him. His God saw the force 
of the words of Moses and repented of the evil he thought to 
do unto his people : as it often happens in this world, the 
Prime Minister has more sense than the King, so it was in this 
instance. Moses was great in one thing, and that was self- 
esteem. In the thirty-third chapter of Exodus, 20th verse, the 
Lord said, " Thou canst not see my face : for th^re shall no 
man see me, and live.'' Now, in several other parts of his 
writings, Moses says he spoke face to face with his God, as one 
man speaks to another. He also tells us that Abraham enter- 
tained God under a tree and they ate together, and God told 
Abraham 'they were going to Sodom and Gomorrah to find out 
if all was true that was said about them. 

Moses also tells us that the Lord had a fight with Jacob and 
he got worsted, but Jacob was good enough to let up on the 
Lord on condition of getting a blessing. Moses also had a 
fight with the Lord and got the best of it but got no blessing. 
The tenth chapter of Numbers, 35th and 36th verses say, ^^And 
it came to pass, when the ark set forward; that Moses said, Kise 
up. Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered ; and let them 
that hate thee flee before thee. And when it rested, he said, 
Keturn, Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel." Here 
Moses acts the Prime Minister again and orders the Lord what 
to do. The twelfth chapter of Numbers, 1st verse, says that 



MOSES A MUCH MARRIED MAN". 87 

Aaron and Miriam spoke against Moses because he had married 
an Ethiopian woman ; Miriam was an old woman of ninety 
years of age, and she did not like the idea of having a negro 
sister-in-law. Josephus tells of another negro wife Moses got 
in Ethiopia. 

The whole of the writings of Moses are an inexplicable lot of 
verbiage, garbage and repetition ; the part that is not at all 
interesting is repeated over and over again, and that part of 
the history that would be interesting he tells very little about : 
for instance, his own history and that of his family he touches 
very lightly — he tells all about Aaron and his children, but of 
his own descendants he tells nothing. Of the forty years in 
the wilderness he only gives about two years of its history. 
Moses says in the second chapter of Deuteronomy, 14th verse, 
^^ And the space in which we came from Kadesh-barnea, until 
we were come over the brook Zered, was thirty and eight years; 
until all the generation of the men of war were wasted out 
from among the host, as the Lord sware unto them/' This is 
all he tells of all this time : they must have been doing some- 
thing that he was ashamed of telling — he therefore was silent. 

The Jews in their perigrination of thirty-eight years traveled 
about eighteen hundred miles, or about fifty miles each year, 
which was only about five day's journey in each year ; and the 
question now arises. What were they doing in all the other 
three hundred and sixty days ? With all this leisure, Moses 
says that they had not time to circumcise the children — that 
task was left for Joshua to perform. He also says that they 
were traveling all this time ; this we know to be untrue, in the 
sense in which he wishes to convey the information, for we have 
his route laid down on a map, and we know that they must 
have encamped in a good country and raised crops for the peo- 
ple and food for the cattle. The account about manna and 
quail is all a humbug : for we know the people could not exist 
on it and the cattle could not eat it. Therefore, the bulk of 
the people were encamped, and marauding parties were sent 
out to murder and plunder all the inhabitants within their 
reach — doing just exactly as they did to the Midianites. And 
yet, with all these three hundred and sixty days of leisure. 



88 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

Moses has the hardihood to say that they had no time by the 
way to circumcise the children. He has told us that his wife 
performed this operation for her sons, and if she did that, why 
could not the women in the Jewish camp do the same ? The 
fact is that circumcision was unknown until it was introduced 
by Moses, for he wanted to make them a peculiar people, and 
he did this, for all time to come, more effectually than by any 
other ceremony that was ever introduced upon the whole earth 
from that time to the present. 

Moses was an arch-impostor and a first-class magician ; he 
had studied all the arts and sciences that Egypt was so famed 
for at that period of the world's history ; he was a man well 
fitted for the task that he undertook, but he labored under 
these disadvantages : — he was too far advanced in years, and 
he was also a stranger to the people ; for, notwithstauding 
the fact that he was a Jew, he had never lived among them or 
consorted with them. When he returned to Egypt it was 
more through the influence of his brother Aaron and his sister 
Miriam that his services were accepted : for it seems that at 
that time the Jews were only waiting for a leader to lead them 
out of Egypt. 



CHAPTER EIGHT. 

MISTAKES OF MOSES. 

MOSES was a great man but not a good one ; there is not a 
particle of evidence to show any disinterested kindness on his 
part in all his writings. Had he been only passably good, he 
would have given more of his personal history. He tells all 
about Aaron's children, but nothing of his own. All that he 
tells of himself, is, first a baby and, forty years after, a mur- 
derer ; then a bully in the Land of Midian ; and again, forty 
years after, he steals his father-in-law's flocks and goes to 
Mount Sinai, but, finding that flocks and herds could be had 
when wanted, he sent the Priest's flocks and herds back to 
him, and got his wife and two sons and started on his expedi- 
tion to Egypt. He was a feeble old man of eighty years wlien 
he took charge of the Jews, and his age was greatly to his dis- 
advantage. 

A great mistake he made was to encourage the Jews to rob 
the Egyptians before they left that country: this act encour- 
aged their desire to acquire more wealth in the same manner. 
It was not the intention of Moses to make a set of marauders 
of the Jews, which they became, but to lead them directly to 
the Land that he had in view for them, and there dispossess 
the inhabitants and settle down as their King ; but, as Burns 
says, *^ The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang a glee," 
and so it was with him, for being too old to command the Jews 
in battle, they appointed Joshua to that position ; and he, be- 
ing a young man, and '' to the manor born," that is, one of 
them, supplanted Moses and became the Commander-in-chief, 
and Moses had to submit, and instead of leading them around 
the Desert he was dragged with them. Any one can see this 
by reading the latter part of the Book of Deuteronomy. The 
(89) 



90 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

religion that Moses introduced among the Jews was a cold 
ceremonial, imposed more to collect a heavy tax than anything 
else^ to snpport the tribe of Levi, who were his main depend- 
ants ; but some of these also turned against him, as the revolt 
of Korah and his followers proves. 

It will be noticed that, in speaking of God, Moses says 
'' Him,'' as though he were speaking of an ordinary person : 
there were no ^^ Misters" in those days, or perhaps that prefix 
would have been used. 

The Jews of the Mosaic period had no moral ideas ; they 
had never been taught any ; and Moses inculcated only a selfish 
doctrine : he told the Jews to not go whoring after strange 
women, for he was afraid of their influence — but they could 
have as many of their own, and the virgins, as they could get. 
He would encourage them to kill whole communities and to 
spare the virgins : these could be incorporated into their tribes 
while they were young and so become Jewesses. 

Read all through the history of the Jews and there cannot 
be found a generous act of disinterested kindness performed 
by them ; on the other hand whenever any people tried to show 
them any kindness they always returned it by some act of atro- 
city, God Almighty had nothing more to do with the exodus 
of the Jews than as much as was evidenced in the case of the 
pilgrim fathers when they landed on the inhospitable shores of 
New England, and the latter were God fearing men — the for- 
mer feared neither God nor devil. The pilgrims came to make 
a home through toil and tribulation, the Jews, to murder and 
rob an inoffensive set of people. 

Ancient history is so vague, and there is so little of it, that 
the misfortune is, we have in a great measure to depend upon 
the Jewish Book for the information that we have — such as 
it is. 

All history derived from this book that has reason to sustain 
it we are willing to accept, but when we see glaring inconsist- 
encies and palpable untruth, and the endeavor to hide these 
defects by giving them the Divine protection, we have to rebel 
and protest against them. 

The Jewish history, for its own selfish purposes, belittles 



MISERABLE DEATH OF MOSES. 91 

the Almifflity ; it represents the Deity as not much more than 
a mortal man. If a million of the best men that ever lived 
could be concentrated into one man, there would still be more 
difference between that man and the Great God than there is 
between man and the smallest insect that crawls on the face of 
the Earth. The brain of man is not capable of conceiving the 
magnitude of God, the Great Creator. Our world in God's 
hand would only be equal to an apple in our own hand. That 
God came on earth, as represented by Moses, is a gross ab- 
surdity and unworthy of our respect. All the evidence that 
the world has ever been able to produce does not give a scin- 
tilla of an idea as to what God is, or where God is ; all we can 
know is that we are enjoying his bounty and we must be satis- 
fied. 

After the Jews had cleaned out the Midianites, they marched 
to the place where they finally crossed over Jordan, but they 
were not ready for the Land that Moses had pointed out to 
them. Notwithstanding that they must have been loaded 
down with plunder secured by shedding rivers of blood, they, 
like Oliver Twist, were crying for more ; and, instead of cross- 
ing, as no doubt Moses wanted them to do, they left Moses on 
Mount Pisgah a prisoner, and they kept on up the country to 
clean out the Amorites and all the other nations in the neigh- 
borhood, and when they had got all they could get they turned 
back again under the command of Joshua, to the crossing- 
place, and there they encamped again to rest from their labor 
of blood ; they there consented to leave the women and chil- 
dren, and all the cattle of two of the tribes of the Jews, on 
that side of Jordan to help the rest. How completely they must 
have destroyed all the inhabitants, that they could trust all 
that was near and dear to a Jew without any protection ! At 
this time it was that Moses died on Mount Pisgah ; and whe- 
ther they killed him, or he committed suicide, or died of old 
age or a broken heart, is not stated : they only say he '* died,'' 
and they left him there like a dead dog — another one of these 
Jewish returns for kind favors bestowed by an nngrateful 
people. They now crossed over Jordan, killing all the inhab- 
itants ; and as they had a large stock of virgins on hand they 



92 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALYZED. 

killed the virgins also. Another inconsistency in the writings 
of Moses is found in Exodus, twenty-third chapter, verses 29th 
and 30th. The Lord said, '' I will not drive them out from 
before thee in one year ; lest the land become desolate, and the 
beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I 
will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, 
and inherit the land.'^ Now, there are very few people who 
take the trouble to examine how much truth there is in just 
such passages as this. The whole of the land that was finally 
occupied by the Jews, from the Great Sea to the Dead Sea, was 
onl}'^ about one hundred and seventy miles long, and about 
seventy miles wide, not large enough to accommodate four or 
five millions of people. Then again : '^ I will send hornets be- 
fore thee, which shall drive out the inhabitants.'^ We are not 
told of any being driven out — they were butchered. Any one 
who can think that our God would sanction an atrocious act of 
this kind, has a very poor opinion of our Heavenly Creator. 
There were a great many blood-curdling atrocities committed 
by these ungodly savages that have not been recorded, and the 
great wonder is that what information we have was ever written 
or handed down to us. We think these facts go to prove that 
these writings were intended as Jewish history solely, and not 
for any other people to read : if this is so, it would go further 
to prove that there is no divinity in them. In fact, we know 
assuredly that our God had no more to do for, or with, the 
Jews, than with any others of His creatures ; and any one who 
would dare to stigmatize his Great Creator with being such a 
monster of cruelty as' represented by the Jewish writers, is no 
better than these savage brutes -were. We also are assured that 
we know for a certainty that the blessing from our God comes 
to all alike ; and we are also punished in this world for our 
misdeeds, and no one can point out any people who ever existed 
on the face of the earth that were more severely punished than 
the Jews were in their after history. 

All is vanity in this world, saith Solomon, the preacher ; he 
should also have added the word absurdity. We have tried to 
show many of the absurdities in the Jewish history, and we will 
now recapitulate some of them, to refresh the reader's mind. 



KECAPITULATION. 93 

In the first place the idea of the world being created by magic, 
with all the trees growing before the sun was made ; the idea 
of God being a man of flesh with a great many wives ; the idea 
of the making of Adam and Eve after the world was populated 
by the sons of Grod, and then the absurd idea of the sons of 
God corrupting the daughters of the descendants of Adam ; 
the idea of the whole world being submerged by a flood ; the 
idea of this God of the Hebrews calling on that mythical char- 
acter, Abraham, for information respecting Sodom and Gomor- 
rah, and then having his feet washed and taking a meal under 
a tree (all very proper if he was a man of flesh like his enter- 
tainer) ; the idea of Jacob and all his family going into and re- 
maining in slavery notwithstanding they had the protection of 
.Josepk who was next to Pharaoh in power ; the idea of the des- 
cendants of Abraham only increasing to seventy-five souls in 
two hundred and fifteen years, and then increasing to four 
millions in the next two hundred and fifteen years, notwith- 
standing a great many of the male infants were killed by the 
order of Pharaoh ; the idea of Moses killing all the horses in 
the whole land of Egypt four distinct times ; the very absurd 
idea of four million people with very much cattle and all their 
belongings crossing over the Red Sea in one night ; and the 
idea of this God making so many mistakes in selecting these 
people for his pet lambs and then threatening to destroy them 
all, but when told by Moses the heathen would laugh at him, 
repenting of what he was about to do ! These are only a few of 
the absurdities : the greatest absurdity of all is in regard to 
the Rock of Horeb. The manna and quail business is hard to 
believe, but when they tell us that one spring had to supply the 
whole Hebrew camp, we say most emphatically it is a gross un- 
truth. Let us go into a calculation to prove this. In the first 
place, according to the number that was given by Moses of the 
Hebrews that left Egypt, it was six hundred thousand men, bet- 
ween the ages of twenty and fifty years : these would represent 
a population of about four million souls, and he also says that 
they had very much cattle. If these figures are correct, the 
number in the Hebrew camp was about equal to the inhabit- 
ants, at the present time, of four of our States, viz., Virginia, 



94 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. Now, reader, how 
many springs does it take to supply these four States ? You 
would not like to say — by way of a guess— fifty thousand, 
would you ! Well, that would not be a great way from the 
number ; but the Hebrew encampment, we suppose, was more 
compact than are the inhabitants of these four States. It 
would take at least twelve thousand springs to supply all these 
people, with their cattle. Now, let us go into another calcula- 
tion to prove our assertion. One square mile would not more 
than accommodate thirty-two families of ten souls each ; and 
one spring to each square mile for three hundred and twenty 
souls and all their cattle is not more than enough. If the He- 
brews were as numerous as they are represented to have been, 
they would cover about twelve thousand square miles, and 
therefore they would require twelve thousand springs. In this 
connection let us say a word about the size of the Land of 
Canaan. It was about the same size as the Jewish encamp- 
ment as described ; and, admitting that all the land could be 
utilized, there was not more than twenty acres to each family 
of eight persons. Notwithstanding the God of Moses said, ^'^I 
will not drive them out in one year, lest the wild beast multi- 
ply against you,'' this God was not a very good arithmetician, 
but perhaps the charge may be turned against the writer. 

^^ Artificial protection of any kind is out of date,'' said 
Prof. Max Mueller, in his opening lecture of the Gifford course 
in Bute Hall of Glasgow University, quite recently. After 
dwelling upon the difficulty of lecturing on religion without 
giving offense, and the general discouragement of free examin- 
ation of religious dogmas, engrafted on our intellect in its 
tenderest stage, the elequent scholar, among other true observ- 
ations, made the following : " There are persons of very sound 
judgment who, though they fully approve of a comparative 
treatment of religions and of the freest criticism of our own 
religion, still insist that it is wise to keep such studies for the 
few. They expressed the opinion years ago that such things 
ought to be written in Latin. It seems to me perfectly useless 
to discuss such proposals now. We must learn to accept the 
times and make the best of them. 



TRUTH IN RELIGION. 95 

" However excellent the motives of some faint-hearted theo- 
logians might he/' said the professor — as he had known them 
among the leading men of the day — '' not only were the reme- 
dies proposed impossible, but it is easy to see that they would 
prove much more dangerous than the diseases which they were 
meant to cure. 

'* To encourage people, and particularly theologians, not to 
speak the truth openly, though they know it, must be fatal to 
every religion. Who could draw the line between the truth 
that may and the truth that may not be communicated ? I 
have known theologians occupying now the highest position in 
the church who frankly admitted among their own intimate 
friends that physical miracles were once for all impossible. 
But they did not consider it right to say so from the pulpit, 
though to many of their hearers such a proposition would pro- 
bably have been far more helpful than many an apolegetic ser- 
mon. Unfortunately there exists at present a very widespread 
impression that preachers do not preach all they know ; that 
they will not help others to face the abyss which all have to 
face, and that they will not open the shutters to let in the light 
of the sun and the fresh air of the morning, which all are 
meant to breathe, but they will keep the truth to themselves. I 
will not say, from any selfish motives, but from fear that it 
might do more harm than good to others. To all this, I know 
but one reply. Can there be anything higher and better than 
truth? Is any kind of religion possible without an unques- 
tioning trust in truth ? Surely he who cannot trust in truth 
cannot trust in anything, and his religion is vain indeed/' 

I could not have believed it possible that, in undertaking 
this work, I should have exposed myself to attacks from theo- 
logians who profess Christianity and call themselves Christians 
and who yet maintain that worst of all heresies that, during 
all the centuries that have elapsed and in all the countries of 
the word God has left Himself without a witness and has re- 
vealed Himself to one race only — the Jews of Palestine. 

Researches in Egypt reinforce those made in India. It is 
certain that the higher class of Egyptians during the captivity 
of the Hebrews in that country were Monotheists, and that the 



96 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

numerous images and objects of art placed in the temples and 
worshipped by the lower classes were really intended to repre- 
sent or call to mind certain attributes of God — that is, to assist 
in the worship of the one true God. 

Moses had received a royal education and moved among the 
highest classes in Egypt. He certainly knew of this feature of 
the religion of Egypt, and this was long before any revelation 
had been made from on high — long before the tablets of stone 
had been brought down from the mountain amid the volcanic 
fires of Sinai. 

Professor Mueller has given us many evidences that he takes 
a common sense view of Divine matters ; it is to be hoped that 
he will continue and not be quite so conservative in future, for 
he knows more than he thinks it prudent to say all at once 
upon this subject ; but the truth is mighty and will eventually 
prevail. He gives us the important fact that Moses, as we have 
shown, certainly did occupy a very high position in Egypt, pre- 
vious to his becoming a fugitive from justice ; this information 
he no doubt gets from the writings of Josephus, for it is not 
found in our Bible. 

If the Egyptians were, as the Professor says, Monotheists, or 
believers in the one God, it would tend to prove that the Jewish 
slaves were rank idolaters, and Moses only copying the Egypt- 
ians and the Midianites. And we ask, Is it possible for any 
one of ordinary intelligence who reads the evidence that is 
daily being brought to light — and which a few years ago would 
have been scornfully rejected by the men who now bring it 
forward — is it possible, we repeat, for anyone to think for a mo- 
ment that there is any Divinity about the writings of Moses, 
or that our God, our Great Creator and Benefactor, had any- 
thing whatever to do with this ungodly set of brutes called the 
Children of Israel ! 



CHAPTER NINE. 

GODLY HEATHEIf AND UNGODLY JEW. 

WE HERE give the prayer that the Jews were in the habit 
of offering (to their God), to show the egotism of these people 
who prayed for themselves only, not caring for the rest of 
mankind. 

The three prayers recited by the pions Jews every morning 
from their Prayer Book : 

1st. Be blessed Lord, that thon didst not make me a 
heathen. 

2nd. Be blessed Lord, that thou didst not make me a 
slave. 

3rd. Be blessed Lord, that thou didst not make me a 
woman. 

In the first place there are no heathen that they give any ac- 
count of who were not a thousand times better than they. 

The prayer and the sentiment of the Priest of Melchizedek 
is far superior to anything that the Jews can point to of their 
own ; and then there is the conversation supposed to have been 
held by Abimelech the King of Gerar, in a dream, with the God 
of the Jews, in the twentieth chapter of Genesis — there is noth- 
ing Jewish that is equal to it for honesty of purpose and true 
piety ; and then again there is Esau, the brother of Jacob, who 
was also a heathen and who had been greatly wronged by Jacob, 
who expected to be punished for these wrongs, but, instead of 
this, he was received by his brother with kindness and protec- 
tion. Where can the Jews point to a record of similar conduct 
on their part ? And then, again, when Joseph presented his 
brothers to Pharaoh, King of Egypt, they were received kindly 
and the whole family was sent for that they might be protected 
from the famine, and they were all treated generously and 
G (97) 



98 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

kindly. Where cau the Jews point to a case in all their history 
in which th«y acted in the same spirit ? And then, again, 
there was Balaam, the prophet, whom they call a heathen, but 
who is the only prophet who has a voucher as such — for Moses 
vouches for him — and there is no voucher for Moses or any 
other Jew prophet but their own history. Balaam treated the 
Jewish horde of savages with the utmost kindness, and, in re- 
turn, he was butchered in cold blood. 

And then again there was the Priest of Midian and his people 
who received the Jews with the greatest hospitality, and, in 
return, they received a Jewish blessing by all being butchered, 
men, women and children, for no cause whatever — but all these 
were called heathens by the Jews. There is not the remotest 
doubt but that all the nations of the world, of the present and 
former ages, most devoutly thank the great Almighty Creator 
that they were not born Jews : for, of all nations and people, 
there is none so despised and so ostracized as the Jews. 

In the second prayer they thank the Lord they were not born 
slaves. Why, they sprung from a race of slaves, aud are still 
slaves to their egotistical feelings, sentiments and dealings. 

In the third prayer they thank the Lord that they were not 
born women. This is not very complimentary to their mothers 
and sisters. They virtually tell them that they are inferior 
beings and not entitled to honor and respect, but only play- 
things to cater to their lust. 

Now that we have gotten through with these prayers, we will 
turn to their Bible and take a leaf from that to show how they 
compare with the heathen there. We have repeatedly advanced 
the fact that the people whom the Jews called heathen were a 
far better people than the Jews according to their own history 
that they themselves give us. To show this fact in the most 
conclusive manner, we give two quotations from two of these 
Jewish Books. The first extract is from the Book of Jonah, 
chapter third. ^' And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah 
the second time, saying. Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great 
city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. 

^' So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the 
word of the Lord, an J he cried, and said. Yet forty days, and 



THE CONTRAST. 99 

Nineveh shall he overthrown. So the people of Nineveh he- 
lieved God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from 
the greatest of them even to the least of them. 

** For word came unto the king of Ninevah, and he arose 
from his throne, and laid his robe from him, and covered him 
with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 

*^^ And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through 
Nineveh, saying, Let neither man nor beast, taste any thing ; 
let them not feed nor drink water; But let man and beast be 
covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God : yea, let 
them turn every one from his evil way.^' 

This is what the heathen did. We now change the picture 
and show what the god-forsaken Jews did, who call themselves 
the people of God, and return thanks for not having been born 
heathens ; and we wish the reader to notice that the event we 
are going to relate about the ungodly Jews happened at the 
very same period of time that Jonah preached to the Ninevites 
by the command of God — the God of the Jews. This account 
is taken from the second Chronicles, twenty-fourth chapter, 
18th to 22nd verses. *^And they left the house of the Lord 
God of their fathers, and served groves and idols : yet he sent 
prophets to them, to bring them again unto the J^ord ; and 
they testified against them : but they would not give ear. And 
the spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoida the 
priest, which stood above the people, and said unto them, Thus 
saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord, 
that ye cannot prosper? because ye have forsaken the Lord, he 
hath also forsaken you. And they conspired against him, 
[Zechariah] and stoned him with stones at the commandment 
of the king, in the court of the Lord, and slew him. And when 
he died, he said. The Lord look upon it, and require it.'' 

Now, reader, we have given you the two pictures, one of the 
godly heathen and the other of the ungodly Jew ; the heathen 
believed in God and repented and were saved ; the ungodly 
Jews were stubborn and unbelievers and consequently, a short 
time after, were damned and scattered to the four corners of 
the earth (as Moses puts it). The great misfortune is that 
people, heretofore, in reading these accounts, did not try to 



100 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

understand them ; they left it all to their teachers, and they 
do not want the people to understand these so-called Divine 
writings, as they are afraid of losing their influence over them 
and thereby of jeopardizing their own material interests. 

We here add another gem of religions literature, from the 
pen of Professor Max Mueller, consisting of stronger evidence 
than any heretofore given to show the difference between the 
godly heathen and the ungodly Jew. The so-called heathens 
in offering their prayers were not so selfish as the ungodly 
Jews : their prayers were more universal. These prayers also 
serve to show that most of the people of the East were God 
fearing and God worshipping people under a different name for 
the Great Almighty being. Compare these prayers with the 
prayers of the Jews and then we can realize how little claim 
these Jews have to being the especial people of God. 

There is one wrong expression in the following Lecture of 
Mr. Mueller, that is, that " The Western part of the world has 
not furnished any sacred Bible. ^' We know that this is not a 
mistake on his part, for no one living understands the matter 
better than he does ; the Christian Bible is purely Greek and 
Latin, but more of the Latin ; the East may have furnished a 
few fragments but they are entirely overshadowed by the Ro- 
man Monks. He knows this but thinks the time has not come 
to say so. Again, a wrong impression is given, inasmuch as 
he forgot the Mormon Bible, which has just as much right to 
the claim of Divinity as any of the others : God, the great 
Creator, has nothing to do with any rag book ; God^s Book is 
the Starry Heavens ; we there see the letters of God's Book 
brilliantly shining, more refulgent than any diamond that the 
Earth ever produced. 

Oriental Greeds. — Prof. Max Mueller's Address at the 

University of Duhlin. 

(The tercentenary celebration of the University of Dublin, 
founded by Queen Elizabeth, which closed on the 8th of July 
last, was the occasion of a number of addresses of great interest 
by distinguished men. Among these was one by Professor 
Max Mueller, of Oxford, upon the Sacred Books of the East. 



SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST BY MAX MULLER, 101 

It is distinguished by profound learning and deep research.) 

The lecture was as follows : 

I have been in the habit of dividing all my friends and ac- 
quaintances, nay, the whole human race, into two classes — 
people with bright eyes and people with dark eyes. By bright 
eyes 1 do not mean those kindly twinkling eyes in which no 
country, I believe, is richer than Ireland, nor do I mean by 
dark eyes the people who try to scowl you out of existence. I 
mean by bright eyes the people who seem to have eyes for all 
that is bright and good, and by dark eyes the people who see 
nothing but what is dark and bad. Of course there is an inter- 
mediate class of well-balanced intellects, but they are the result 
of a long discipline, and I am speaking at present of natural 
dispositions only. 

Nowhere, however, can we observe the influence of the good 
or the evil eye more clearly than in the judgments passed on 
the various religions of the world. You may know that during 
the last sixteen ye^rs I have been engaged, in connection with 
some friends, in bringing out a large collection of translations 
of the (Sacred Books of the East. Forty volumes are published 
and eight more are to follow. Still this is only a drop in tlie 
ocean. (Applause.) 

In the numerous reviews which this collection of the Sacred 
Books of the East has elicited, the tendency of critics to see the 
dark or the bright side only has been very conspicuous. 

According to some these Sacred Books deserve no translation 
at all. They were pronounced mere rubbish, of no earthly 
interest to anybody— nay, according to some theologians, dan- 
gerous and offensive. 

TREASURES OF PRIMEVAL WISDOM. 

According to other critics, however, they were treasures of 
primeval wisdom, full of truth and light, and not inferior to 
our own Sacred Books. (Hear, hear.) It seems very difficult 
for the followers of any religion to admit a single weak point 
in their own sacred books, and equally difficult to admit any- 
thing true and good in the sacred writings of other religions. 
It is only a man so strongly grounded in his own faith as St. 
Augustine was who could venture to say as he did, that there 



102 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALYZED. 

was 110 religion which does not contain some truth. (Hear, 
hear.) A confession ajl the more startling if we consider by 
what religions St. Augustine found himself surrounded. East- 
ern philosophers looked upon what I call the bright eye, that 
is, the power of discovering what is good, even wheu it is hid- 
den by what is vile and corrupt, as almost a divine gift. 

In the short space allotted to me I can only read you a few 
very short extracts from the Sacred Books of the East. 

If we except the Jewish and the Christian religions, there 
are but seven religions which have possessed the sacred books 
on which they profess to be founded. They all come from the 
East, for, whatever the West may have done for us, the mother 
of all religions is the East, These seven religions are, the 
religion of the Brahmas, the religion of the followers of Buddha, 
the religion of the followers of Gina, the religion of the follow- 
ers Zarathushtra, the religion of the followers of Confucius, 
the religion of the followers of Lastrye, the religion of the fol- 
lowers of Mohammed. Neither Greeks, nor Romans, nor 
Germans, nor Celts, nor Slavs have left us anything that de- 
serves the name of sacred books. And the same applies to 
Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Phoenicians. I shall 
confine my short extracts to what may be called prayers ad- 
dressed to the old deities by their worshippers. I leave it to 
you to find out whether it is possible for us to join in some of 
these devotional utterances. And first an ancient Egyptian 
prayer to Amon, translated by Prof. Le Page Renouf : 

EGYFIIAN PRAYER. 

^^I come to Thee, Lord of the Gods, who hast existed 
from the beginning, eternal God, Who hast made all things 
that are, Thy name be my protection ; prolong my term of 
life to a good age ; may my son be in my place (after me) ; 
may my dignity remain with him (and his) for ever, as is done 
to the righteous, who is glorious in the house of his Lord. Who 
then art thou, my Father Amon ? Doth a father forget his 
son ? Surely, a wretched lot awaiteth him who opposes Thy 
will ; but blessed is he that knoweth Thee, for thy deeds pro- 
ceed from a heart full of love. I call upon Thee, my Father 



PROFESSOR MAX MUELLER'S ADDRESS, 103 

Anion ! Behold me in the midst of many people, unknown to 
me ; all nations are united against me, and I am alone ; no 
other is with me. My many warriors have abandoned me ; 
none of my horsemen hath looked toward me, and when I called 
them, none hath listened to my voice. But I believe that Anion 
is worth more to me than a million warriors, than a hundred 
thousand horsemeci and ten thousands of brothers and sons, 
even were they all gathered together. The work of many men 
is nought ; Amon will prevail over them." 

This, after all, is not so very different in spirit from some 
of the psalms of the Old Testament. The next prayer is taken 
from the Vida, and is addressed to a god called Varuna, who 
bears the same name as the Ouranos in Greek : 

'*Letme not yet, Varuna, enter into the house of clay, 
(the grave) ; have mercy. Almighty, have mercy ! If I go 
along unsteady, like a cloud driven by the wind, have mercy. 
Almighty, have mercy ! Through want of strength, thou 
strong and bright God, have I gone to the wrong shore ; have 
mercy. Almighty, have mercy ! Thirst came upon the wor- 
shiper, though he stood in the midst of the waters ; have m'er- 
cy. Almighty, have mercy ! Whenever we men, Varuna, 
commit an offense before the heavenly host, whenever we break 
thy law through thoughtlessness, have mercy. Almighty, have 
mercy !" 

This is a very simple prayer, but it clearly shows a conscious- 
ness of sin and a belief in Divine mercy. These two ideas 
come out more strongly in the next hymn, likewise addressed 
to Varuna : 

" Take away from me this terror, Varuna ! righteous 
King have mercy upon me ! Like as a rope from a calf, remove 
from me my sin ! For, away from Thee, I am not master even 
of the twinkling of an eye. Do not strike us, Varuna, with 
weapons which at Thy will hurt the evil doer. Let us not go 
where the light has vanished. Scatter our enemies, that we 
may live. We did formerly, Varuna, and do now, and shall 
in future also sing praises to Thee, O mighty One, For on 
Thee, unconquerable Hero, with all laws, immovable, as if 
established on a rock. Move far away from me all self-com- 



104 MOSAIC HISTQKY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

mitted guilt, and may I not, King, suffer for what others 
have committed. Many dawns have not yet dawned ; grant us 
to live in them, Yaruna/'' 

I wish I could give you more extracts from " Vida,^' but I 
must hurry on. The next prayer is from the Avista, the sacred 
code of the Zoroastrians, the modern Panu : 

ZOROASTRIANS' PRAYER. 

'' Blessed is he, blessed is everyone to whom Ahura, Masda, 
(Ormass) ruling by His own will, shall grant the two everlast- 
ing powers — health and immortality. For this very boon I 
blessed Thee. Mayest Thou, through Thy angel of piety, give 
me happiness, the good true things, and the possession of the 
good mind, (the Holy Spirit). I believe Thee to be the best 
being of all, the source of light for the world. Everyone shall 
believe in Thee as the source of light, in Thee, Masda, most 
beneficent spirit ! Thou hast created all good true things by 
means of the power of Thy good mind always, and hast pro- 
mised us a long life. I will believe Thee to be the powerful 
benefactor, Masda ! For Thou givest with Thy hand, filled 
with supports. Thou who art good to the righteous man as well 
as the wicked, by mieans of the warmth of fire strengthening all 
good things. For this reason the vigor of the good mind has 
fallen to my lot. Thus I have believed in Thee, Ahuramasda ! 
as the promoter of all that is good, because I beheld Thee to 
be the primeval cause of life in creation ; Thou who hast re- 
wards for deeds and words, hast given evil to the evil and good 
to the good. I will believe in Thee, Ahura, in the lasf 
period of the world. In whatever period of my life, I believed 
in Thee, Masda, munificent spirit, in that Thou camest with 
wealth, and with the good mind, through whose actions our 
settlements thrive. ^^ 

KO BUDDHIST PRAYERS. 

I cannot give you any prayers from the Buddhist Scriptures, 
for the simple reason that prayers, in the usual sense of the 
word, as petitions addressed to the Deity, are not tolerated by 
the Buddhists. In the ancient sacred literature of China, also. 



J 



PROFESSOR MAX MUELLER'S ADDRESS. 105 

we look in vain for real prayers. There is a curious saying of 
Confucius which seems to express the general Chinese concep- 
tion of the relation of man to God. '^ Reverence the spirits/' 
he says, " but keep aloof from them '' In more modern times, 
however, the Emperor is expected to address a prayer to the 
God of Heaven. I shall give you a few extracts from it : 

*'To Thee, mysteriously working Maker, I look up in 
thought. How imperial is the expansive arch where Thou 
dwellest. Thy servant 1 am, but a reed or a willow. My heart 
is but as that of an ant, yet have I received Thy favoring de- 
cree, appointing me to the government of the Empire. Far 
distant here, I look up to thy heavenly palace. Thy servant, 
I bow my head to the earth, reverently expecting Thy abund- 
ant grace. Thou had vouchsafed, God, to hear us, for 'Jliou 
regardest us as a father. I Thy child, dull and unenlightened, 
am unable to show forth my dutiful feelings. I thank Thee 
that Thou hast accepted the intimations. Honorable is Thy 
great name. With reverence we spread out these gems, and, 
as swallows rejoicing in the spring, we praise Thine abundant 
love.'' 

For an Emperor of China this is very creditable. The next 
specimen is taken from a famous chapter of the Koran : 

FROM THE KORAX. 

^' God, there is no God but He, the living, the self-subsistent. 
Slumber takes Him not, nor 'sleep. He is what is in the 
heavens, and what is iji the earth. Who is it that intercedes 
witli Him save by His permission ? He knows what is before 
them and what is behind them, and they comprehend not aught 
of his knowledge but of what He pleases. His throne extends 
over the heavens, and earth, and it tires Him not to guard them 
both, for He is high and great." 

AN INDIAN PRATER. 

The last extract shall be from a prayer that may be heard in 
India to the present day : 

" Whatsoever has been made, God made. Whatsoever is to 
be made, God will make. Whatsoever is, God maketh — then 
why do any of you disquiet yourself ? I believe that God made 



106 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

men, and that he maketh everything. He is my friend. 
foolish one, God is not far from you. He is over you. You 
are ignorant, but He knoweth everything, and is careful in 
bestowing. He that believeth not in the one God, hath an un- 
settled mind ; he will be in sorrow, though in the possession of 
riches ; but God is without price. 

^' God is my clothing and my dwelling. He is my ruler, my 
body and my soul. God ever fostereth his creatures, even as 
a mother screens her offspring, and keepeth it from harm. 
God, who art the Truth, grant me contentment, love, devotion 
and faith. 

'' Thy servant prayeth for true patience, and that he may 
ever be devoted to Thee.'^ 

RAYS OF ETERKAL TRUTH. 

Surely our hearts ought to beat with joy whenever we meet 
with such prayers in the sacred books of the East. A sudden 
brightness seems to spread over the darkest valleys of the 
earth. 

When we. read them we should learn from them that no 
human soul was ever quite forgotten, and that the rays of 
eternal truth can pierce even through the darkest clouds of 
superstition. (Applause.) I am quite aware how easy it is 
to find fault with childislj gropings, and how readily people 
join in a laugh when some strange and to us, grotesque expres- 
sion is pointed out in the ancient prayers of mankind. 

We know how easy it is to pass from the sublime to the ridi- 
culous, and nowhere is this more the case than in religion. 

Here, too, we want bright eyes, if we wish to understand the 
often childish language of religious devotion. 



CHAPTER TEN. 

MOSES AKD THE AGE OF THE WORLD. 

ALMOST the whole of the writings of Moses are either fic- 
tion, humbug, or untruths ; there is not one chapter in the 
whole of them that evinces generous kindness or disinterested 
motives ; he wrote for his own interest and his self-aggran- 
dizement. 

Moses was an Egyptian by birth and education : he was 
born a slave and of slave parentage, but having^had the good 
luck to fall into the hands of Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted 
him from the extraordinary circumstances in which slie found 
him, he was taken charge of by this Princess and educated in 
the very highest degree that Egypt was so famed for at that 
period. When he arrived at the age of manhood he no doubt 
was an important member of the Egyptian Court and also of 
the Army, for Josephus tells us that he had command of the 
army and conquered Abyssinia, and that the reigning Princess 
of that country — who was a negro — became one (jf his wives 
as a trophy of his valor. As long as the Dynasty under which 
he had been adopted lasted, he flourished ; but, unfortunately 
for him, a change of Dynasty took place, and then he was ig- 
nored and driven back into servitude. As an evidence of this 
fact, when he returned to Egypt and appeared before Pharaoh, 
he, and Aaron too, were told to get to their burden, notwith- 
standing he was eighty and Aaron eighty-three years of age. 
He then became soured and dissatisfied and finally committed 
a crime for which he had to flee from that country — and he 
became a fugitive slave. But, being a man of good presence 
and fine military education, when he presented himself at the 
Court of Midian he was immediately adopted as a son, for the 
second time, and also became a Prince and a prominent per- 
(107) 



108 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AI^ALYZED. 

sonage of that Court. In reading the very trifling history that 
he gives of himself during his second forty years, we are apt to 
think that he was a shepherd, attending to the flocks and herds 
of his father-in-law. In one sense, such was the fact, for he 
had charge of what was the wealth of the Country, and there- 
fore was at the head of the Treasury department. 

The Jews in Egypt were slaves pure and simple, and nothing 
else. The history that Moses wrote in regard to them was all 
fiction. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all mythical. The 
history that Moses gives of himself — which is very trifling — is 
enough to prove that he was a very ambitious man : not being 
satisfied with being a Prince of two Courts with no line of suc- 
cession, he undertook the arduous task of trying to make him- 
self the King of his fellow slaves. To accomplish this object, 
he adopted the very extraordinary and unique plan of writing 
a Book — the assumed history of the slave population of Egypt, 
whom he called Hebrews. This name signifies people who 
came from beyond the River Euphrates. 

Now, supposing that some man from a neighboring nation 
should have come among our slave population — previous to 
emancipation — in the United States, and tried to induce them 
to leave the country all in one body so as to make himself their 
ruler, what would have been the most feasible manner to ac- 
complish this matter? Not by preaching to them, for only a 
small moiety would have listened to him ; but if he could, with 
the assistance of emissaries, induce them, by working on their 
credulity, to believe that he was sent by God to lead them out 
of bondage into a land flowing with milk and honey, particu- 
larly if he had a Book which he said was inspired by God, that 
proved all he claimed, then he would stand some chance of 
success. Well, this is just what Moses did, but he must have 
had a very difficult task in this undertaking, for he was forty 
years in accomplishing his plans. He no doubt had a great 
many assistants, but, notwithstanding all this, when he finally 
succeeded, the overbearing misfortune to himself was that his 
plans had been so long in developing that he became too old to 
realize all of his ambitious views. 

We will now revert again to the so-called Hebrews that were 



NO CONFIDENCE IN MOSES. 109 

slaves in Egypt. They were a mixed people brought from dif- 
ferent countries and sold as slaves ; there is not the least pro- 
bability that they were descended from one family, as Moses 
would have us believe, nor were they all of the Caucasian race : 
they were of every shade and color, most of them coming from 
the upper part of Egypt, from Abyssinia and other parts of 
Africa, and also no doubt many were from the opposite direc- 
tion, namely, Asia — that part of it adjoining Egypt. To prove 
that there must have been many of the Negro race among them 
we have the evidence that Moses himself had at least two Negro 
wives, which also goes to prove that they were not very parti- 
cular as to c®lor. 

When Moses wrote his Book he gave the age of the world as 
being a little over two thousand years ; it was important for 
him to bring the Creation within his reach so as to be able to 
give a genealogy to these ignorant people, and try to make 
them believe that they were descended from a godly race of 
people, and that the Gi-od of their — fore-fathers was about to 
take them under his special protection, and that he (Moses) 
was the especial agent sent by God to carry out His plans. 
How much confidence they placed in Moses and his God, we 
leave to be judged of by their conduct after leaving Egypt. 

That the Hebrews were in bondage in Egypt there is no 
doubt, and they wanted to be freed from it, and did not care 
who aided in helping them to freedom, whether it was a God or 
a Devil so that they got it. And they did get it : and when 
they did get it they acted more like Imps from Hades than a 
godly people ; they ignored this God of Moses right from the 
commencement, and Moses also — after only two years' rule — 
and that length of time was only kept up by the strong arm of 
the Levites, who were the body guard of Moses. We will also 
go back to this holy Book, a part of which Moses says was 
written by the finger of God, and try to find out how much 
truth there is in it. These Laws, that he says were written by 
the finger of God, Moses was the first to violate : for when he 
came down from the Mount with these Laws, one of which 
says, *'Thou shalt not kill,^^ and he saw the Hebrews dancing 
around a golden calf, a thing that they had all their lives been 



110 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

accustomed to do, he ordered out his Levite guards and killed 
three thousand of his people ! This was divine vengeance the 
people did not appreciate ; nor did they submit to it long, for 
a short time after this atrocious act Aloses was deposed and 
Joshua put in his place, and from that time until thirty-eight 
years had expired Moses and his God were no more heard from. 

Any intelligent, disinterested reader who is in the habit of 
reading the views put forth by scientists of the present day in 
regard to Nature and Nature's Laws, and about the discoveries 
that have been made in regard to the heavenly bodies, and 
then comparing these views with the first chapter of Genesis, 
that gives the views and ideas that are put forth by Moses, that 
great — supposed to be — inspired writer, must feel humiliated 
for the Christian religion that has adopted all this trash as 
Divine matter. We know and feel that most of the learned 
people realize this feeling most acutely, but do not see their 
way clearly how to get rid of it. They should do as the Rev. 
Mr. Taltnage says, *^ Pitch it all overboard and make a new 
Creed if necessary. ^^ There is no use in hesitating about the 
matter, for as soon as we are convinced that it is not Divine 
we had better get rid of it : for a half, or even a quarter, of 
the Bible would be better than the Big Book with three-fourths 
of doubtful reading. 

Turn to the sixth chapter of Genesis and read that pitiful 
account about the sons of God coming upon Earth and cor- 
rupting the daughters of men and causing the whole human 
family to be destroyed (that is, Moses says so) by the flood ; 
but we are well satisfied now from recent discoveries, that this 
whole account of Noah and the flood is untruthful and pure 
fiction, the emanation of the brain of Moses. There was a local 
flood, and there was a man who saved all his family and live 
stock in a Big Boat — and nothing more. If we can convict 
Moses in one untruth, then his whole fabric must fall to the 
ground, and we feel fully able to convict him of more than 
fifty misrepresentations in the Book said to be written by him. 

^Tis said that '^ Birds of a feather will flock together.'^ Our 
teachers are following in the footsteps of Moses and the Levites. 
Like the witness who in mistake said that the horse in question 



'^YOUR BEST friend/' 111 

was fourteen feet high (meaning ^Miands/') when his attention 
was called to the blunder, said, that if he had said that the 
horse was fourteen feet high, he would stick to it, as he would 
not contradict his oath ; so it is with the teachers, they are 
afraid to go back on what they or their predecessors have been 
preaching for so many centuries. Most of them now realize 
the absurdities and improbabilities of the writings of Moses, 
but they do not like to acknowledge this very important fact. 

When Richeleau was Prime Minister of France, the King 
was greatly influenced by female favorites, but Richeleau, by 
his skill, got rid of them and drove them from Court. In the 
play, on the stage, the king complains to his minister that he 
has taken away all those that he loved, and Richeleau looks at 
the king, taps his own breast, and exclaims, ''Love me, your 
Majesty : I am your best friend/' This part of the play will 
apply with force to the clergy of the present day. If they 
would discard all this trash written by Moses the Jew, the 
murderer and the falsifier, and turn their attention to the 
Great Creator, our God, not the ignorant, weak and vacillating 
God of the Hebrews, but the great Benefactor of mankind. 

Moses, with all the described 'inspiration,'' knew nothing 
whatever about the creation of the world. This is not strange, 
for no one else ever did or ever will know anything about this 
important fact. We are not finding fault with him for his 
ignorance, but for his impudent and sacrilegious assumptions 
and falsehoods he has written on the subject. He, and the 
Jews, claimed to be inspired by God; we, the descendants of 
the so-called heathen, only claim to be inspired by ISTature : wfe 
leave the matter to be decided by the reader. Who is right. 
We have in our midst thousands of those so-called heathen 
descendants who are inspired by Nature only, who are a thou- 
sand times better qualified to write and give intelligent ideas 
than any Jew that ever existed from the Exodus to the des- 
truction of Jerusalem ; and were it not for the glamour of Di- 
vinity with which thfse Jewish writings have been surrounded, 
they would have been thrown aside long ago. 

We here give a quotation from an address delivered before 
the British Association by an eminent scientist, which contra- 



112 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

diets the account given by Moses in tolo. We could give many 
others of the same character if necessary, but think that most 
of the reading public are very well convinced by this time in 
regard to the un-divine character of all of them. The reason 
Moses gave the age of the world was to get a genealogy for the 
Jews ; we think this fact alone ought to disprove the whole of 
the Divine claim. 

THE AGE OF THE WORLD. 

In his recent address to the British Association, Sir Archi- 
bald Geikie, the eminent geologist, took note of the revised 
estimate of the earth's age, which physicists are now forcing 
upon the world's attention. Since Sir Charles Lyell wrote his 
^^ Principles,'' g^eologists have been disposed to claim for the 
earth a vast antiquity. A thousand millions of years would be, 
in the opinion of the orthodox geologist, a moderate estimate 
of its age. 

The present causes seen to be at work altering sea and land 
have been held to account sufficiently for the present appear- 
ance of the earth's sutface. Catastrophes and cataclyms and 
other like hasty methods of effecting changes have been dis- 
missed as the hypothesis of ignorance. Unlimited time, in 
fact, has been quietly assumed by the geologist in explaining 
the phenomena of his science. The amount of sediment car- 
ried to the ocean by rivers measures both the wearing away of 
the land and the building up of new strata in the sea. The 
rate varies greatly. Where it is most rapid the lowering of the 
surface of the land is l-730th of a foot in a year ; where it is 
slowest the rate is 1-6, 800th of a foot a year. In other words, 
the rate of deposition of new sedimentary formations over an 
equivalent area of sea-floor may vary from one foot in 730 
years to one foot in 6,800 years. Assuming that existing 
strata, where most fully developed, attain a thickness of 100,- 
000 feet, the time required for their formation would thus ap- 
pear to have been, at the more rapid rate, 73,000,000 years ; 
at the slowest rate, 680,000,000 years. 

It has been argued that all kinds of terrestrial energy are 
growing feeble ; that sedimentary deposits were made faster in 



KO MAGIC IN CREATION". 113 

former times. But there is no evidence of this, according to 
Sir Archibald, in the rocks. *' We see no proof,^' he says, 
*' that. the rate of waste and sedimentation was more rapid 
during Mesozoic and Palaeozoic time than it is to-day. '^ 
Long periods of time are suggested by the successive races 
of plants and animals that have left their remains sealed 
u^ in the rocks. Vast ages must have elapsed while type 
was succeeding type in continuous progression. 

According to the writings of Moses the world is less than 
six thousand years old, but Science indicates that it is more 
than fifteen thousand years old. 

One of the greatest absurdities in the writings of Moses 
is his idea of the Creation of the world. He says that it 
was made to appear from the water, as if by magic. Every 
one of ordinary ability knows that the crust of the Earth 
is solid rock ; the earth or soil is the accretion from the de- 
composed ropk that is caused by the operation of rain and 
sun, and, instead of the world coming out of the water, 
water was an after consideration. 

One fact seems certain, that the World existed for thou- 
sands of years before there was sufficient soil for vegetation 
to grow. 

Our God does nothing by Magic ; everything in his creation 
is regulated by Nature's laws. 

In the first chapter of the book of Matthew, in the New 
Testament, it says that there were fourteen generations 
between Abraham and David, which, according to Moses, 
were Abraham; Isaac and Jacob, then Judah, Phares and 
Esrom, that being six generations to the going down into 
Egypt, and then Aram, Atninadab and Naasson were born 
in Egypt. Salmon, Booz, Obed, Jesse and David were born 
in the Land of Canaan. 

Now, to show the fallacy of the writings of Moses, it will be 
seen that but three generations were born in Egypt, and in 
these three generations Moses multiplies the seed of Judah, 
Phares and Esrom to seventy-five thousand men between the 
age of twenty-five and fifty years, which would represent a 
H 



114 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AKALYZBD. 

population of about 400,000 souls ; from Abraham to the 
going down into Egypt was the same length of time that the 
Jews were in Egypt, where they had only increased to seventy - 
five souls. The reader can judge as to the reliability of thi^ 
account. 

In the time of David the tribe of Judah consisted of about 
three million souls, but had they increased at the same rate 
that they did in Egypt, they would have numbered under 
David two thousand five hundred million souls — a greater 
number of people than there are in the whole world at the 
present time ! And it must be remembered that they were 
living under more favorable circumstances in the Land of 
Canaan than they were in Egypt, for it was a land flowing 
with milk and honey, which greatly adds to the chances of 
procreation. Surely these figures show the absurdity of the 
account written by Moses. 

When David was in the zenith of his power, he caused the 
people to be numbered ; he had conquered all the country 
from Egypt to the river Euphrates, and from tlie Mediterra- 
nean Sea to beyond the river Jordan, and with all this addition 
of territory and population the Jewish nation had only a little 
more than doubled their number in five hundred years. 



CHAPTER ELEVEN", 

WHO WROTE THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT? 

'JlIE QUESTION has been mooted at different times and 
at different places in the last fifty years as to who wrote the 
works of Shakespeare, and very properly too, for we know that 
to write a work of that extraordinary character it would require 
a very extraordinary genius, and also a man who had traveled 
very extensively to give him the knowledge and experience that 
are there displayed. 

There is no evidence that Shakespeare was either a great 
genius or a traveler ; the only evidence that we have concern- 
ing him is that he was an ordinary actor and nothing more. 
Had he been the genius that is disclosed in these very extraor- 
dinary works he would not have passed through the world un- 
noticed by the people of his day, which was during the very 
brilliant reign of Queen Elizabeth. But such is the fact in his 
case : he was entirely ignored as a great man or writer ; and 
it was not until several generations after his time that his 
works were published to the world, and notwithstanding he 
still has the credit of their authorship, there are great doubts 
in the minds of many in the present investigating age as to 
who was the writer of these great works. Only about three 
hundred years have passed since Shakespeare's time, and if in 
these intelligent centuries a doubt springs up, concerning so 
short a time, how much more ground for doubt is there in the 
case of the Jewish writings, the first of which were«^aid to have 
been written thirty-five hundred years ago and the last, by Ezra 
the Scribe, about twenty-five hundred years ago ! All those 
written since that time are of very doubtful origin. 

During this one thousand years, from Moses to Ezra, the 
Jews were subject to many vicissitudes : they were frequently 
(115) 



116 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

conquered by the surrounding nations and carried into cap- 
tivity., their Temple and all their sacred scrolls destroyed, and 
finally the ten tribes were annihilated. After this the Judeans 
were carried away to Babylon, and every vestige of the Temple, 
and all the vessels and sacred scrolls either destroyed or taken 
away. In view of all these great changes, to whom can the 
authorship of the different Books of the Jewish history be 
ascribed? We know who some of the reputed writers are, but 
the question that is now absorbing the public mind is. Are 
these Books a true copy of what was written by the original 
writers ? Until recently Moses has the honor of having written 
the first five Books ; it is now surmised that he did not write 
one half of them ; what he wrote was placed in the keeping of 
the Levites, and they no doubt made a great many additions 
and alterations so as to subserve their own material interest. 
That which was written by Moses was mostly done in the Land 
of Midian, for the reason that after he left Egypt he was too 
old to write much and also he had too many cares on his mind. 

In reading the account of the first battle after leaving Egypt 
it will be seen that Moses' hand required to be held up with 
the enchanting rod in it, showing that he was old and feeble. 
Another fact is, that in the last Book he gives an account of 
his own death ! 

There are at least three distinct versions of the Jewish Bible 
now in existence : the first is the orthodox, or the Jewish text, 
and this is the one we use ; the second is the Septuagint, or 
the Greek version — the one that Josephus appears to have had 
the most faith in ; the third is the Samaritan Bible. 

Prom the many evidences that are coming to light in these 
days it appears that the one we use was mostly re-written at a 
very late day of the Jewish history, by Ezra the Scribe, and is 
not reliable for the following reasons : in the first place, the 
ten tribes of Israel were finally conquered by the Assyrians and 
carried away into captivity ; they had in all of their history 
been so troublesome to the neighboring nations that the Assy- 
rians determined to exterminate them as a nation, and they 
therefore repopulated the whole of the country with other peo- 
ple who were non-Jews, and who were afterwards called Sama- 



THE JUDEAK SCROLLS. 117 

ritans, from the principal Jewish city of that name. These 
people flourishad for a while, but it seems that some great mis- 
fortune befel them and continued for some time ; they were 
told by some one, who was supposed to know, that it would al- 
ways be so until they adopted the creed of the former inhabit- 
ants ; so, to avoid misfortune, they became — Jews, or adopted 
the Jewish religion with all of its forms and ceremonies ; they 
ased the same scroll that the Judeans did, and that is how 
they came to have a Bible : but, notwithstanding they were 
acting in good faith, the Judeans and the inhabitants of Jeru- 
salem hated them most cordially and bitterly, and refused to 
recognize them or have any intercourse with them. The Sa- 
maritan Scrolls in use by them were an exact copy of those 
used in Jerusalem previous to their captivity, which misfortune 
befel them about one hundred and thirty years after the capti- 
vity of the Israelites. The Judeans were taken to Babylon, 
where they were in a most degraded state of slavery ; they made 
no pretensions of any religious form in the worship of God ; 
they must have been in the same low condition tjiey were in 
when in the Land of Egypt in former days, and no doubt the 
Babylonians were just as glad to get rid of them as the Egyp- 
tians were. 

As an evidence that the Jews were' idolators in Babylon, it 
must be noticed that when they returned to their own country 
under the leadership of Zerubbabel and Ezra the Scribe, they 
were entirely bereft of all the — so-'called — divine writings or 
scrolls. This shows conclusively that they were not used in 
the City of Babylon ; and these facts all go to prove that the 
Jews were always more idolators than a God serving people, 
not only in this instance but in all of their history. The 
Levites were the only ones who served Moses and his God, and 
they did it for self interest : their history in Babylon was so 
un-godlike and soun-Moses-like that in after ages these Levites 
tried to smother up the facts by writing the Book of Daniel 
and some others to try to show just what was contrary to the 
truth. These books have been proved to be the work of fiction, 
written four hundred years after the captivity in Babylon. 
The Jews in all of their history Avere only Monotheists when 



118 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AISTALYZED. 

they were under the influence of the Priests and Levites, and 
that was only in the vicinity of the City of Jerusalem, and the 
Priests often lost their influence there. 

We now come to the important question as to the reliability 
of the present Old Testament. When the Jews got back to 
Jerusalem under the leadership of Zerubbabel and Ezra the 
Scribe, the Samaritans — who practised the same faith and cere- 
monies — offered their assistance to them, not only in furnish- 
ing copies of the scrolls, but they also offered to assist in the 
rebuilding of the City, both of which offers were indignantly 
refused by these stubborn, stiffnecked, bigoted people. It is 
supposed that the task therefore devolved upon Ezra to re- write 
most of the Jewish writings, and, having only some fragment- 
ary scraps of parchment, they had to depend upon tradition 
and the memory of some of the older men : and this is why 
either of the other two versions would be preferable to the one 
we make use of. 

When Alexander the Great was on his conquering expedition 
he stopped in Jerusalem and took great interest in the Jewish 
religion and history. He requested to be put in possession of 
a copy of all their writings, to which the Jews consented, and 
they therefore sent seventy of their most learned men to Greece 
to transcribe all their writings. This is why it is called the 
Septuagint, or the work of the seventy ; this would seem to be 
the most reliable one, and i^ the one that Josephus seems to 
copy from. 

There are grave doubts in the present day as to the author- 
ship of many of the Books of the Old Testament : for instance, 
the Book of Daniel that was supposed to have been written in 
the City of Babylon during the captivity, now appears to have 
been written four hundred years after that time. If this is so, 
then all those writings are the work of fiction ; therefore Neb- 
uchadnezzar, Belshazzar^s feast, the three brothers in the fiery 
furnace, Daniel in the lion's den, and the Book of Esther, are 
fiction — the emanation of the brain of some smart Jew ; just 
as it was with Moses in his account of Abraham, Isaac and Ja- 
cob, and the going down into Egypt to escape the famine ; all 
of which we have shown is fiction from the brain of Moses. 



JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY. 119 

It will be noticed that the writings of Daniel are said to have 
been written one thousand years after the time of Moses, when 
there was a little more light in history and some data to judge 
from. Now, if it is true about the unreliability of the Book 
of Daniel, of which there is no doubt, as was demonstrated by 
a prominent student of the Johns Hopkins University, then 
there is every probability that most of the writings of Moses 
are all pure fiction. 

Then there is the Book of Job, which, according to the date 
in the Bible, is contemporary with the writings of Moses ! If 
there were any evidence needed to show its unreliability, this 
date would be sufficient : for any person of common sense who 
reads this book can see that it was written more than two thou- 
sand years after that date ; and it was not written by a Jew — 
for the devil had not been invented at thai; time ! — it was writ- 
ten more likely by some Christian Monk who was aping alter 
Moses and the writer of the Book of Daniel. 

All this trash is palmed off on a confiding community of 
Christians as of divine origin ! There is no doubt that many 
more of these humbugs will be discovered in the near future. 
Some of the books of the so-called '^ prophets'" are nothing 
more than therantings of a parcel of cracked-brain enthusiasts. 
There is neither rhyme nor reason in any of these writings. 
They predicted that some extraordinary events would occur, 
but nothing of the kind ever did or ever will happen. And 
again, some of these books were so obscene and contrary to 
orthodox ideas of what they ought to be, that they had to be 
altered and toned down to suit the demands of the times. We 
allude, particularly, to the Book of Ecclesiastes ; and then 
there is the Book called the ^' Song of Solomon,'" whish is to- 
tally unfit reading for any refined family : it is vulgar vulgar- 
ity, and nothing else. 

. A paper was read before the Philological Society of Johns 
Hopkins University, by Dr. Christopher Johnston, Jr., which 
sheds much light on the '^ Briggs"' controversy — at present the 
most exciting episode in the religious world. Dr. Briggs does 
not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, and he 
claims that they should be interpreted by reason and conscience, 



120 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALYZlEB. 

. or, to put it differently, that they should be supplemented and 
corrected by reason and conscience. His opponents cling to 
the theory of verbal inspiration, or absolute correctness, and 
assert that, however repugnant the Scriptures may apparently 
be to reason, they must be accepted without modification or 
question. The subject of Dr. Johnston's paper was, '^The 
Empires of the Book of Daniel,'^ and though Dr. Briggs was 
probably as remote as possible from the author's thoughts when 
he prepared it, the paper, as far as it goes, confirms with start- 
ling clearness the contention of that gentleman. 

The Book of Daniel purports to have been written by a cap- 
tive Jewish prophet during the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar, 
Belshazzar and Cyrus, or about 550 B. C, and to supplement 
with greater detail prior prophecies of events that occurred near 
the coming of Christ, the last great fact of Christianity being 
also foreshadowed. 

Of course, to those who hold that prophecy is a necessary 
proof of the truth of Christianity, the absolute accuracy of 
Daniel is of the first importance ; but with those who hold with 
Dr. Briggs and other clergymen who think like him, the book 
may be a very good and useful religious treatise, and still con- 
tain errors. 

Dr. Johnston's paper points out the curious fact that the 
writer of Daniel was more familiar with events occurring dur- 
ing the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, from 175 B. C. to 161 
B. C, at which time, it is believed by great scholars, to have 
been written, than with events occurring during the reign of 
Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, when the recorded events 
were asserted to have been witnessed by Daniel : for instance, 
the bitter persecution of the Jews ; the raising of the brazen 
image for the Jews to worship ; the robbery of the Temple ; 
the sacrilegious use of the golden vessels : the attempt to con- 
vert the Jews, and the showering of rewards and honors upon 
those who apostatized the suspension of the right of petition 
to God for thirty days, are all events which actually did occur 
during the reign of Antiochus, but there is no record of their 
having occurred at the time mentioned by Daniel. When, 
however, the history of the period at which Daniel says he 



INACCURACIES OF THE BOOK OF DANIEL. 



12l 



wrote is examined, the most surprising inaccuracies are disco- 
vered : — 

Belshazzar is described as the son of Nebuchadnezzar, when 
in reality he was the son of Nabonidas, who reigned long after 
Nebuchadnezzar's death, and who, though he left many records 
of his reign, never claimed to be related to his great predeces- 
sor. Belshazzar is represented as succeeding Nebuchadnezzar 
and as being guilty of tyrannical, sacrilegious and abominable 
practices — charges perfectly accurate if made against Antiochus 
four hundred years later, whereas there is nothing in profane 
history to show that Belshazzar reigned at all, though there is 
proof that because of his remarkable abilities and virtues, he 
was elevated by his father to a share in the government of the 
country subordinate to his own. Cyrus and Daniel are inex- 
tricably confused by the writer of Daniel, which is the more 
singular because the leading events in their lives have been 
made familiar by profane writers. In the same manner it fur- 
nishes a lesson to-day to Christians of the certain defeat of 
wickedness, and the triumph of those who hold steadily to the 
right. Dr. Briggs insists that to assert that such barefaced 
discrepancies as are pointed out in the Scriptures are inspired 
from on high is to belittle religion and insult the Almighty. 
He surely has some ground for his faith. 

The above evidence in regard to the Book of Daniel was 
taken from the " Baltimore American'' of May 17, 1891, 



CHAPTER TWELVE. 

MISFORTUNES OF THE CHRISTIAN CLERGY. 

REV. DR. WELD knocks another prop from the support 
as to the '^ divinity '' of the Jewish writings. We have already 
given evidence as to some books that are of doubtful origin, 
and we expect to give other evidence as striking. We herewith 
give a part of the sermon preached in regard to the authenti- 
city of the Book of Jonah, from which it appears that it is a 
work of fiction written several centuries after the time indic- 
ated. All these misfortunes are coming so thick and fast upon 
the Christian Clergy that they are drawing closer and closer to 
one another for mutual protection ; we expect in the near fu- 
ture to see the different denominations that have heretofore 
been so hostile to each other meeting in holy communion and 
reconciling their differences, just as the politicians did when 
the conflict between the North and South occurred ; they will 
meet together in convention and form a New Theology, and 
adopt a New Bible, eliminating all that is doubtful and ignor- 
ing all that is anti-Christian : and when this happens they will 
have a love feast and the millennium, when the lion and the 
lamb shall lie down together and a little child may lead them. 

Dr. Weld said, in part : — Jonah, the son of Amittai, and 
prophet of Jeroboam IL, lived in the eighth century before 
Christ, tie was a child when Homer sang — a contemporary 
of Lycurgus — and died a century before Romulus and Remus 
founded the great Latin kingdom. It was four centuries after 
the time of Jonali that Herodotus began to mark the events of 
the world, yet the Hebrews look upon him as one of the great- 
est of their prophets, and even to-day the Mohammedans vene- 
rate him ne'xt to Abraham. The times were rough and filled 
with superstitions and portents ; snake stories were rife every- 
(122) 



INEXPLICABLE INCONGRUITIES. 123 

where. We need only recal Andromeda and King Oephus ; 
with Hercules cast into the sea and swallowed by a fish. 

In Babylon was worshipped the fish God, who rose from the 
mighty deep and taught the people the different Arts. The 
sun was thought to be nightly swallowed by the sea, and a" 
generally known saying of the time, if anyone was engulfed in 
difficulty and distress, was that he was swallowed by a whale. 

Such was the time in which lived the Hero of this book that 
occupies so strange a place. Taken literally, it has been the 
cause of more skepticism and infidelity, and has wrecked the 
faith of more people, than any other part of these scriptures. 

The separate events offer inexplicable incongruities and dif- 
ficulties. We see Jonah — to whom the wojd of the Lord had 
come directing him to go to Ninevah — go down to Joppa, take 
ship for T^arshish, and the storm, the whale and the song, 
but no fish is mentioned, and we read of the three days spent 
in the belly of the whale. Then, cast upon the shore, Jonah 
is again sent East to Ninevah, a city of sixty or seventy five 
miles in circumference. Think of such a person frightening 
the Assyrian King ! Waiting on the edge of the city, he sees 
the swift-growing gourd, and has another talk with the 
Almighty, who is repentant of his evil purpose with regard to 
Ninevah. 

Taken literally it is, indeed, a stumbling-block ; but, now, 
look for a moment at the interpretation of the book by the 
higher criticism, which claims that the book was written by an 
unknown author, about the time of Ezra and the return from 
captivity ; that this unknown writer took the Jonah legends 
belonging to far-off times, with the well known proverb of 
the whale, and wove them into a story. 

In the third lesson we have the key of the whole book, ''And 
should not I spare Ninevah?'^ How these words that sound 
to us so calm and cold must have fallen like sparks of fire upon 
those Hebrews ! How their spirits must have burned when 
they heard that their God, who had brought them out of Egypt 
and had given them David and Solomon, wlpose chosen people 
they deemed themselves, should love other nations, that He 
was not the Jewish Jehovah alone ! No truth has had so hard 



124 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AI^ALYZED. 

a time to make its way as, ^^ Of one blood are all the Nations 
of the Earth/^ 

It is the gaining acceptance of this truth which is making 
the nineteenth century what it is, and the Millennium can only 
come when all believe it and follow its dictates so that men 
live as brothers and sons of the Almighty God. The Book of 
Jonah is the embodiment of the first gleam of that truth which 
Christ taught us in the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, 
and which we, to-day, are beginning to realize is the founda- 
tion of all religion, God the Father of all humanity. 

Here is a short extract from a sermon preached by a Meth- 
odist minister. History also furnishes us with the same infor- 
mation. If this account is true, there can be no better evid- 
ence of the untruthfulness of the accou^it given by Moses of the 
flood, for it would be impossible for this number of people to 
be on the whole face of the earth in three generations, much 
less in one country only. Two million of soldiers would 
represent a population of about ten to fifteen million of inhab- 
itants : — 

We fail to take into account the task imposed on Jonah in 
his call to cry out against Ninevah. . . The city itself was 
called after the son of the ''^mightiest hunter"' of his day, 
Ninus, grandson of old Noah. Like his father, he was a mighty 
man. His army consisted of 1,700,000 footmen, 200,000 
horses and 16,000 chariots armed with scythes. This was the 
kind of people Jonah was called to cry out against. Do you 
wonder he hesitated ? Would you have done any better ? 

We quote, also, the following : 

Professor Paul Haupt, who fills the chair of Oriental Lan- 
guages in Johns Hopkins University, and who is recognized as 
one of the ablest Oriental scholars in the world, recently read 
a paper before the Philological Association of the University 
upon the Book of Ecclesiastes. He analyzed the book, and 
showed the impossibility of its having been written by Solomon 
as is claimed by those who cling to the theory of verbal inspir- 
ation. 



DR. T. K. CHEYNE ON THE PSALMS. 125 

Professor Haupt sHows that there have been numerous inter- 
polations in the Book of Ecclesiastes and that not a few of them 
were added by later writers, who disapproved of the tone and 
teachings of the book, for the purpose of modifying or neutral- 
izing its philosophy and religion. He also points out that be- 
cause of these interpolations and interferences, if such a term 
can be proper, the chapters and verses have become detached 
from their real connection and so intermingled that oftentimes 
the sense is impaired, and he rearranges the latter part of the 
book to read as the author wrote it, with the interpolations 
taken out and placed by themselves. As Ecclesiastes is one of 
the canonical books of the Old Testament, it is, we must sup- 
pose, just as much inspired as the others. 

The Latest Higher Criticism on the Book of Psalms, 

The '* Independent/^ (N. Y.,) gives a full page to a review, 
or, rather, an epitome, of t^e Bampton Lectures on ''The 
Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter in the Light of 
Old Testament Criticism and the History of Religions." 

The author is the eminent scholar. Dr. T. K. Cheyne, Oriel 
Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, Oxford. 

The Independent says 'Mt is the latest, most elaborate and 
the most significant publication issued from that school of 
English exegetical scholarship of which the author is a leading 
representative." 

From the five columns in which the book is described we 
take the following leading points : — 

STARTLIIiTG CONCLUSIONS 

Professor Cheyne tells us that he regards the Psalter as a 
movement of the best religious ideas of the Post-Exile Jewish 
Church from the time of Jeremiah onward. He reaches the 
conclusion that all of the Psalms, except possibly the 18th, 
which he describes as the epic of the Davidic family, were 
written after tlie Exile, and that their arrangement in the sev- 
eral books, as we now, have them, occurred chiefly during the 
Maccabean age, or, at least, within the two or three centuries 
before Christ. 



126 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

The author repudiates entirely the opiaion that David wrote 
even a single psalm, or that any of the psalms existed in their 
present form in the age of David. The great King was a 
gifted musician and poet, a sweet song-maker, who could fas- 
cinate the cruder people of his day ; but he was known alto- 
gether by his secular poetry. He may possibly have composed 
religious songs, though not in the style of the psalms, and 
phrases or even verses of Davidic origin may have crept by ap- 
propriation into some of the psalms. 

But these psalms were church hymns, almost wholly congre- 
gational utterances, and as there was no church in the time of 
David, such hymns were not possible in his age, or even in that 
of Isaiah, two centuries later. The ascriptions of certain psalms 
to David as their author, are wholly unreliable ; they were in- 
serted probably to give them standing in the Jewish mind after 
the exile. 

THE PSALM WRITERS. 

But, for the most part, the writers of the psalms were men 
who lived during the Exile or after it. These men represented 
and put into poetic shape the religious ideas and sentiments of 
their own times. In some instances they wrote as court poets, 
to celebrate the praises of some illustrious Prince of that later 
day. One psalm is a nuptial ode, most probably — a mere work 
of art — and is entirely void of religious significance. Some of 
these church psalms were written by poets of an inferior grade, 
moderately gifted writers, who were hired to write plain hymns 
by the church authorities. In another instance a didactic 
psalm is written by a certain wise man, who has turned poet 
for the occasion. In fact, psalm writing was a common phe- 
nomenon in that period — an age full, it is said, of inspiration. 

Yet the inspiration was not such as to lift the writers above 
error. Their zeal was sometimes holy and sometimes fanatical, 
often too violent jn expression. ISome of them were devout 
mystics and their productions are characterized by mystical 
thoughts and feeling. 

The psalmists are often inaccurate ; in fact, there is not a 
single trustworthy biographical reference to be found in their 



WHO WERE THE REAL WRITERS ? 127 

productions. Their language is often in excess of their real 
feeling ; they are carried away by the popular enthusiasm 
surrounding them. 

Some one has said that '' We may call the Spirits from the 
vasty deep/^ but, will they come ? This is what is being done 
with Jewish Literature that has been reposing in fancied secu- 
rity for the last two thousand years, but which is now being 
shaken up like old dry bones to get some substance or evidence 
as to who was their creator and who was responsible for this 
very unsatisfying batch of said-to-be divine writings. In the 
first place it is very easy to ask questions that are sometimes 
very hard to answer, and this is one of them. Not having any 
direct evidence we are compelled to depend upon circumstan- 
tial, and this in the present day, in all our criminal trials in 
capital cases, is considered to be the very best kind of evidence. 
This prelude is intended to bring again the question before 
the public as to who were the real writers of this God-forsaken 
lot of Literature called the ^'' Old Testament I " The writer 
of this is not expecting that he can settle this question for good 
and all, for he knows his inability to do it justice, but he is 
depending upon others who have undertaken the task and who 
it is hoped will in the near future be able to expose all of these 
writings as being not only not divine, but of a spurious nature. 
From the evidence that has heretofore been produced, there is 
no doubt in any reasonable mind that not one of the Books of 
the Old Testament was written at the time it indicates, or by 
the person who is alleged to be the author of it. 

We will commence with Moses. There is no real evidence 
that he wrote any part of the Pentateuch ; circumstances seem 
to point to his having written the Book of Oenesis, and also 
some of the Laws enunciated after leaving Egypt. If he did 
write them, there is no evidence of any Manuscript at that 
time or at any time after for seven hundred years ; the only 
evidence that can be pointed to of his writing is in the latter 
part of the Book of Deuteronomy, and it is a generally con- 
ceded fact that he did not write this Book. 

Moses, from the little evidence we have of him, must have 



128 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALTZED. 

been a man with few equals in his time, and for any strong- 
minded and well-educated man to write all the unreasonable 
theories and all the repetitions that are contained in these 
Books is not at all probable. Any one who will take the pains 
to analyze these writings must come to the conclusion that 
they are the emanations of a lot of uneducated and unrefined, 
ignorant men, who lived and flourished a long time after the 
days of Moses. 

For seven hundred years after the exodus of the Hebrews 
from Egypt there is no evidence of any literature, writing, or 
settled government among them ; they lived more like the In- 
dians of this Country when it was first discovered than like 
civilized beings ; they had no forms or service of a religious 
character until the days of Solomon, and there is no evidence 
of any history in writing before the days of David ; the whole 
history of the Jewish nation up to this time was tradition, 
handed down from mouth to mouth, each Priest or Levite could 
add to or take from it as he pleased — destroying its reliability. 

Any one reading the Book of Judges will find that it was 
written long after the date indicated, for we read of things that 
exist eve?i to this day^ that is, the time the writing was done. 
The Book of Samuel, which we would naturally conclude was 
written by the prophet himself, we can only conclude was done 
at a later day. The Book of Ruth is the work of some smart 
novelist. As for the Books of Kings and the Chronicles, we 
all know that they were written after the whole of the Jewish 
nation had ceased to exist. And tiie Book of Isaiah that is 
supposed to have been written by himself, is very doubtful, for 
during the period in which he flourished the ten tribes were 
carried away and he says nothing of that important fact. 

The very first evidence we have of Jewish writings was done 
under David and Solomon, who had Court Scribes. 

Some of the Books of the so-called prophets are patch-work. 
The Books of Daniel, Jonah and Esther are fiction, written 
several centuries after the time indicated ; and, in fact, almost 
the whole of the Old Testament, when presented to us as of 
Divine origin, is a conglomeration of silly nonsense and child- 
ish absurdity. 



CHAPTER THIRTEEN. 

LECTURE BY PROFESSOR HARPER, OF CHICAGO. 

The Jeiois'li Bible Not the Word of God. 

WILLIAM R. HARPER, LL. D., president of the Chicago 
University, lectured recently at the Levering Hall of the Johns 
Hopkins University, on " The Divine and Human in the Old 
Testament History.'' We quote from this lecture as follows : 

In discussing this momentoiis subject, two questions at once 
present themselves : the origin of the material, and the value 
and character of the material, which are inseparably connected. 

As to the origin, the question arises : Is this literature hu- 
man or divine, or is there some supernatural influence to be 
found ? Granting a supernatural element, was the knowledge 
of the historical facts recorded imparted directly by special 
revelation, or did it merely guide the author ? If the divine 
origin be granted in any particular and also that it is scienti- 
fically imperfect, how are they to be reconciled, and how far 
is this record human and divine ? 

The traditional method of answering this question is that 
our fathers have regarded the Old Testament as perfect, and 
that this is good enough for the present. The a priori method 
is, that as we know Cod to be perfect. His revelation must be 
scientifically accurate, at least in outline. It must have come 
in a certain way and be of a certain character. If the facts 
cannot be explained, it is the word of Cod, and this suffices. 
But the only true method is to examine the facts as they pre- 
sent themselves, noting those which contain the supernatural 
element and those of a human character, and then consider 
how these facts may be reconciled. In this connection I may 
say that there are three classes of people as regards belief in the 
I (129) 



130 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

Bible — those who believe absolutely in its accuracy, and are 
thus guilty of bibliolatry ; those who are conscientiously skep- 
tical, and those who are wholly indifferent. 

The Bible is called the Word of God ; but the fact is lost 
sight of that the language used is human, and, therefore, im- 
perfect : and this is especially true of the Hebrew, for it is in- 
capable of conveying a distinct, definite thought. Here, in- 
deed, the human element is so evident, it must be acknowl- 
edged. The text is corrupt, and the alphabet used in the 
present Hebrew version is different from that used in the an- 
cient. The literary form also shows the human element. It 
is a compilation, and is lacking in the proportionate space 
given to different events. It is redundant and repetitious, 
colored in form and augmented in material. In all this, how- 
ever, it should be remembered that the purpose of the work was 
didactic, not historical. The Old Testament is unscientific — 
though I do not attach importance to this — and it is not a his- 
torical text ; but it must be stated that there is close connec- 
tion of parallel matter outside, which shows the stories related 
are not myths or come from objective revelation. From this 
we must conclude that the human element is present. 

In any sketch of the Old Testament histories, however gen- 
eral and imperfect, we should not fail to note the relation of 
their characteristics to each other. Let us put them side by 
side and compare them. We find them to be : 

1. Absence in many cases of chronological order of arrange- 
ment. 

2. Lack in many cases of chronological indications. 

3. Apparent incompleteness and fragmentary character. 

4. Selection of special subjects for emphasis. 

5. The material is a compilation from many previously ex- 
isting sources. 

6. The prophetic element and religious spirit. 

The first and second naturally go together, although to be 
sure there might be maintained a strictly chronological order 
and at the same time no chronological marks be present. The 
third and fourth also stand together, for the existence of the 
fourth makes the third necessary. If special attention is to be 



i 



PROFESSOR harper's LECTURE. 131 

given to one event or one kind of events, other events or other 
kinds must be omitted or slighted. The same will hold true 
of the various details in a single event. 

The fifth characteristic is in accordance with what we know 
of most ancient writings. The methods of history-writing in 
vogue to-day are comparatively modern. In some respects 
compilation is a greatly inferior method. There are other 
respects and there are very important ones, in which it is vastly 
superior. Granting, now, that the material as we have it has 
been compiled from various sources, do not the first four char- 
acteristics I have enumerated follow in inverse order ? A com- 
pihition is a selection ; a selection implies the omission of what 
is not selected ; matter selected thus from many different 
sources, taken out by chapters or verses, cannot be expected to 
preserve the chronological indications which, perhaps, existed 
in the original source. The first five characteristics are, there- 
fore, mutually related. Some, indeed, of the four could not 
exist without the fifth, but granting the fifth, the others 
necessarily follow. 

Professor Harper, in a former article, said that *' The teach- 
ers will not tell all they know, they will not open the shutters 
to let in the light and fresh air that the people ought to be al- 
lowed to breathe.'^ The same charge might be brought against 
him ; he is afraid to say all he knows or suspects. The posi- 
tion he occupies prevents him from coming out boldly and 
giving his real sentiments, but he gives enough to let one un- 
derstand what he thinks : it is evident that he has no faith in 
the divinity of the Bible as the Word of Grod. He proves very 
conclusively that the Bible, both Old and 'New, is nothing more 
than fragments of writing collected together and worked up by 
human ingenuity into a whole book. The real trouble is that 
if he were to come out boldly and say all he thinks about the 
matter he would be ostracized by all those with whom it is to 
his interest to keep on good terms, and perhaps he would be 
classed with Ool. Ingersoll ; but the day may come in his life- 
time when he will be free to speak boldly, and then we shall 
have a scientific millennium and Professor Harper will occupy 
a higher position in the opinion of the world than he now does. 



132 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

We have quoted largely from the Christian party, we will 
now introduce evidence from quite another section of society, 
and it shall be furnished by a Jewish Rabbi, who discusses the 
nature of '' Reason/' and there is a good deal of reason in all 
he says on the subject. 

Rabbi Tobias Schonfarber, of liar Sinai Temple, Lexington 
Street, preached an interesting sermon a short while ago in re- 
ply to an assertion made by the Rev. Frederick H. Gibson at 
the P. E. Convention at St. Peter's Church, Baltimore. His 
words were : '^ The great danger is that men of the present 
time placc'too much confidence in man's reason.'' 

Said the Rabbi : Against the last word of this quotation have 
the canons of the church been directed from the start. Reason, 
the angel-daughter of God, has been turned into a very devil 
by 'the devotees of the old-time religion. 

Reason has been considered a fiery coal, and every one who 
touched it or used it, they thought, would be consumed. 
Reason has been painted in the darkest of colors by those who 
were waxed to faith and ignorance and superstition. 

From the earliest times reason has been decried and faith 
has been elated, reason has been dethroned and superstition 
put upon the high pedestal of honor by the higher dignitaries 
of the church. But look over the pages of the world's history, 
study the onward march of civilization, note what has brought 
the world to its present station, and think what would bring it 
to a loftier eminence still. And if you do, we cannot see how 
you will tell men to desist from making use of that which God 
has given them to use. 

We want to see the whole world open their eyes and think. 
We do not care to go back into the dark days of the stunting 
of the growth of the intellect. We hail this day of freedom 
and enlightenment, when men are more and more merging 
forth out of the stifling atmosphere of the dingy dungeon of 
ignorance and blind credulity. Faith alone never accomplished 
anything. It is faith combined with reason that opens the 
way for man and leads him into fields unthought, yes, undreamt 
of, before. Faith is a faithful assistant to reason, but without 
reason, faith would accomplish next to nothing. We can easily 



REV. T. SCHONFARBER'S DISCOURSE. 133 

see how every new discovery was combatted. How the church 
fought against the Copernican system of astronomy, and every 
other change that seemed to militate against the Scriptures, 
but to-day, when we pride ourselves upon the many conquests 
made in the world of science ; to-day, when we boast of our 
civilization ; to-day, when we say that the sun of intelligence 
has come to lighten up the lives of one and all alike — to-day we 
cannot understand such an utterance, '^that people place too 
much confidence in man^s reason. '' 

It sounds harsh and grates upon our ears. We do not won- 
der, then, that the people are leaving the churches, and do not 
care to attend them. We do not wonder that there is such a 
great complaint against the smallness of the numbers devoted 
to the study of religion. We do not wonder that the men of 
science are arising and telling us that religion is consecrated 
to ignorance and superstition, and that the men of profound 
thought will have nothing to do with it. We do not wonder 
that even the men with lesser minds prefer to let it alone. 
They don't want to affiliate themselves with anything that can- 
not bear the light of reason and research. Why, that must be 
a queer kind of phenomena that must hide itself when the light 
is thrown upon it. If religion cannot stand the test of the 
critic's knife, it is doomed. 

'^ Socrates suffered death, Luther was reviled, Galileo cast 
into prison and Newton called a heretic, because they loved 
the truth so dearly ; because they wanted to follow the direc- 
tion of God's hand, as it appeared to them. 

" To be true to the purposes of life, such thinkers cared as 
little for threats, papal bulls, the ipse dixits of priests, as they 
did for the approval of the generality of men,'' 

We quote also the following : 

REASON AND THE SCRIPTURES. 

Those who decline the exercise of reason in the acceptance or 
rejection of any portion of the Scriptures are scarcely aware 
of the ambiguous position in which they place themselves. 
They not only belie the daily operations in all departments 



134 MOSA.IC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN"ALYZED. 

of nature, but they discredit the very sources from which reli- 
gion may be said to emanate and through which it is spread 
among the people. What uses do ecclesiastical colleges and 
seminaries serve, if the Bible is absolutely the word of God and 
verbally inspired from on high ? Why are teachers and preach- 
ers compelled to pass through a long and arduous course of 
training to fit them to explain intelligently the Scriptures to 
their congregations ? Is not the reason of these teachers 
trained as well as their emotions ? Is not a large part of their 
education devoted to the task of reconciling conflicting passa- 
ges of these same Scriptures, and are not the sermons preached 
by many of the divines to their flocks devoted to the same 
task of explaining why one evangelist says men must be saved 
by works, while another says they must be saved by faith alone ; 
why one says Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, and 
another says Jesus never met John during His entire mission 
on earth ; why one of the books of the Old Testament makes 
the dying injunctions of one of the greatest of the Hebrew 
kings to his son curses upon his enemies, while another makes 
them blessings upon all of the people of Israel, and other in- 
consistencies in the Scriptures too numerous to be recapitu- 
lated ? 

Why should these things be explained if all are inspired and 
reason cannot be exercised ? 

We here give another quotation from a sermon delivered by 
the eminent Jewish divine. Rev. Tobias Schonfarber : 

THE AGE WE LIVE IN. 

Said he : People are fond in our time of telling us just what 
sort of an age this is in which we are living. It is an age, 
says one, " where science is busy at work demanding an answer 
to the many questions that perplex the mind of man. Faith 
has left the sanctuary of the soul, and where once unquestion- 
ing trust in the traditions of our fathers held rule, now the 
mind of man feels itself bound down by no such authority, and 
holds itself free to choose for itself whatever it is to think and 
believe/' 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 135 

''It is the age of materialism/^ says another; *'Men are 
grasping ; tliey are chasing after the accumulation of vast 
stores of wealth, and in their haste to amass fortune they forget 
the duty they owe to others. It is an intensely practical age, 
where everything is valued in accordance with its market value 
— study as well as everything else/' On the other hand, there 
are those who speak of this age as one idealistic in its tenden- 
cies, and they point to the spread of the humanitarian spirit, 
to the many charitable institutions and. educational centers 
that are being given life by the whole-souled sons of God. 

It is true that men are changing their conceptions of reli- 
gion, that science is forcing her conclusions upon the thinking 
world of to-day. Men no longer believe in the six days' crea- 
tion story — in the six thousand years as the age of the world. 
They are fast discarding their belief that God can break in 
upon the laws which He has implanted in nature in the start, 
and thus perform a miracle. 

Iron law sways the universe, and there can be no infringe- 
ment nor infraction upon its eternal, unchangeable course. 

Tlie belief in the infallibility of certain books is being cast 
aside, as well as that of certain men. But we must not forget 
tliat along, aside of this free thought and change of front as to 
what religion ought to be, there is still much of that blind 
faith and credulity that has become a clog upon the wheel of 
progress. While men are bold enough to give utterance to their 
convictions, there are those who stand ready to persecute them, 
and bring them before higher tribunals, to answer to the 
charge of heresy. All are not in harmony with the progressive 
spirit. 

There is still much work left for the men of science, and the 
men who consider it their right and their duty to investigate. 
We believe, however, that ultimately the victory will come to 
those who take science with them as their handmaid. 

The Rev, Dr. Lyman Abbott, the distinguished pastor of 
Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, preached an interesting sermon 
in his pulpit, recently, in which the Briggs heresy case fur- 
nished the inspiration. The following utterances of the Rev. 



136 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AKALYZBD. 

gentleman appeared originally in the New York " Times/' 
and serve to show the tendency of modern thought. ^^The 
Bible is not the word of God/' declared the Eev. Dr. Abbott ; 
and he spoke of Dr. Briggs as a '^modern prophet/' fit to rank 
with the prophets of the Bible. 

We quote from the Rev. Doctor's discourse : 

ABRAHAM. 

Two thousand years before Christ a man is living in a pagan 
community — Abraham. He is living without any real knowl- 
edge of the one true God. Somehow he comes to a dissatisfac- 
tion with the pagan religion in which he is living, he rises up, 
turns his back upon his native land, and goes out he knows 
not whither that he may know this God. 

This is the beginning of the religion as we have it traced for 
us in the Bible. He gathers his children about him, and they 
worship the God whom he worships. He finds sacrifice is the 
common method of the worship of the deities about him, and 
he accepts sacrifice. He finds altars reared to the deities, and 
he erects an altar to his own true God. 

CHURCH ORGANIZATIO^N". 

Four centuries pass by. For 400 years religion lived in tke 
hearts of men without a Church. Then comes Moses. He 
leads the children to Mount Sinai. He gives them the Ten 
Commandments. He organizes a Church. 

A THOUSAND YEARS WITHOUT A BIBLE. 

From the Ten Commandments there begins to cluster a lite- 
rature. But 1000 years pass by before that literature is framed 
into anything like a book. There is a priesthood, there is a 
prophecy, there is a Church, but there is no Bible. The world 
has lived 400 years without a Church, then the Church lives 
1000 years without a Bible, and then, in the time of Ezra, 400 
or 500 years before Christ, the Old Testament comes into some- 
thing like its present form. 



REV. DR. LYMAK ABBOTT. 137 

Four hundred years more pass away. Christ comes. The 
first thing Ohrisc does is to inspire a new hope and a new life 
in the hearts of individuals. He comes preaching the gospel 
of hope, glad tidings. And after He has done this for a year, 
or a year and a half, He gathers twelve men out of all those 
that listened and forms the nucleus of a Church. 

A century and a half, at the very smallest estimate, pass by 
before the New Testament comes into existence. 

That is the history as you may find it in your Bibles, any 
one of you to-day. 

''WHAT DOES IT MEA]^ ? ^' 

What does it mean ? Why this ! That the Bible is itself 
the product of the Church, and the Church is the product of 
the individual experience. That first comes, the individual 
consciousness of God, and then out of all the gathered con- 
sciousness of God there comes the institution of religion, the 
Church. 

But, God helping me, I will let no man put the Church 
between me and God, or put the Bible between me and God, 
or put creed between me and God, or all three as a three-barred 
gate between me and God. . 



CHAPTER FOURTEEN. 

THE GOD OF MOSES ANALYZED. 

OUR SPIRITUAL hopes and our future welfare are the 
questions that are mostly agitating the public mind of the 
greater portion of the civilized world of the present day. Very 
few doubt the existence of a Oreat God, who created and rules 
the Universe ; but this Almighty God is not the God who was 
introduced to the Jews by Moses : that God was the God of 
the Hebrews only ; they monopolized him and were unwilling 
that any other people should participate in the worshipping of 
him. We are perfectly willing to concede this God to them, 
for he was not the kind of a God that we want to adore. 

The God whom we worship is the Universal God, the God of 
the Gentiles, the pagans, the lieathen and the Jews — the God 
of all, who treats all alike, and that sends the gentle dews 
from above on both saints and sinners ; this God, as compared 
to the God of the Jews, is like comparing a mountain with a 
grain of sand. 

The present effort on our part is to analyze the God of Moses 
and see how he will compare with the Great Almighty God, 
who, we contend, was never revealed to man on Earth except 
through the Creation. 

The first question we have to consider in reference to the 
God of Moses, who is presented to us as the Great God, and 
whom the people heretofore have very innocently accepted as 
such. As to the way in which Moses got all the information 
he so lavishly writes for the Jews only, is what puzzles us : the 
history that he gives dates back more than two thousand years 
before his time, and as there is not the slightest evidence of any 
history we want to know how he got his facts, and more parti- 
cularly in regard to the Creation. If we ask the Teachers this 
(138) 



I 



" INSPIRATION.'' 139 

question, tliey answer ^^By inspiration/' This we know to be 
untrue, for inspiration from the Great God would be Truth 
and Light, whereas these writings are a jumble of prevarica- 
tions and mystifications. 

Inspirations from our God would have the strong impress of 
truth and probability stamped upon them, and there would not 
be any need of so much preaching to explain them. The God 
presented by Moses was the God of the Hebrews only, a God 
that he introduced to the Jews to subserve his own material 
interest ; it was a handy God that he could keep near him — 
our God was too far off to suit his purpose. The God that we 
worship is a Great God, a Universal God, a God who is mighty 
and never changes, who is present and Omnipresent, whose 
power is so great that His wishes are executed like lightning 
flashes. Our God does not need the assistance of man to do 
what He desires to be done ; the God that Moses presents to us 
is a pigmy in comparison with Our God, and we want to take 
no part or parcel in this God of the Hebrews. 

Moses introduces his God as a great Magician, possessing a 
very limited power. He does not tell us where he came from 
in the first instance ; we know that he did not come from hea- 
ven, for, according to Moses, there was no such place until the 
second day, although he afterwards tells us that his God came 
down from Heaven. JSTow if some of the teachers will tell us 
what is up and dotun when applied to the supposed heavenly 
home of our Great God and Creator, we will feel under obliga- 
tion to them. 

Our God, we feel that we know, never came down, there 
never was any commencement to our God, nor is there the 
smallest particle of history in regard to our God. Moses tells 
us different in regard to Ms God : he says, in the commencement 
God created the Heaven and the Earth. The earth was created 
first, therefore previous to this his God had no home. 

The idea that Moses inculcates is that his God was a young 
man just commencing business, and who had lived in darkness 
up to this time ; for on the second day he said '* Let there be 
Light," and he saw that the Light was good. It appears from 
this that his God had never enjoyed the lujxuryof Light before 



140 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALYZED. 

this time, for he tells us that darkness covered the vast deep, 
and that God commenced the Creation in the dark, which was 
all very proper if it was dene by Magic, as he intimates. He 
does not tell us what this Light consisted of, that was made to 
appear on the Second day. 

We know that all light emanates from the Sun, and the Sun 
was not made until the Fourth day, therefore the world was 
more than half done when the Sun was made. Moses tells us 
that Grod made all the trees, herbs and all growing things be- 
fere there was any Sun. On the Sixth day, God said, ^'^Let Us 
make man in Our own image, "*' and they made man, both male 
and female. 

The idea of Moses was that God was only flesh and blood, 
like our own weak humanity, and perhaps his God was, for, 
after building himself a house, which he called heaven, he 
took a number of wives to commence the business of ponulat- 
ing the world. This may appear to the reader to be absurd, 
but there are several passages in his writings that can be given 
to prove it. 

We want to call particular attention to the fact that the 
making of man on the Sixth day had no connection whatever 
with the creation of Adam and Eve, for they were an after con- 
sideration ; those who were made on the Sixth day were the 
sons of God, and they were blessed and told to be fruitful arid 
multiply and replenish the earth. There was nothing of the 
kind in regard to Adam and Eve, but just the contrary : they 
were not blessed, nor told to be fruitful, but were told that the 
day wherein they tasted the tree of Life they would surely bring 
sickness and death into the world. 

After God had completed all his creation he rested on the 
Seventh day, and how long after this he rested the account 
does not say. It will be noticed that to his sons and daughters 
created on the Sixth day he gave every tree and herb and the 
fruit thereof for food, with .no exception ; and after looking 
over his work he found that this would not be sufficient, that 
the soil would have to be cultivated, and he then saw that there 
was no man to till the soil ; he therefore made Adam for that 
purpose, and then again he saw that Adam needed a help-meet 



EVE AS A MILKMAID. 141 

and he made Eve as such ; all this was done some time after the 
making of his sons and daughters, but the creation of Adam 
was for dressing the Garden in Eden ; he was nothing more 
than a laborer, and, like all servants, he received orders what 
to do and what he should not do. 

God/s sons and daughters were to enjoy themselves ; the 
only injunction was to be fruitful and multiply, just as our 
sons and daughters do here, when they are rich ; and as the 
God of Moses owned a garden of several million acres of land, 
besides owning all the live stock in the world, he therefore 
could afford to let his children enjoy life and keep servants to 
till the soil, for which purpose Adam was intended, and Eve 
to milk the cows and make the butter. 

Moses tells us that the serpent held a confab with the woman 
and persuaded her to taste of the Tree of Life. Here is another 
puzzle. We want to know how a serpent could talk ! We are 
told, " By inspiration.'^ If that is so, then his God was act- 
ing deceitfully toward Adam : for he first prohibits him from 
tasting the fruit, then sends the serpent to beguile them with 
lying words. The serpent does not seem to have had much 
respect for his maker, for he flatly contradicts the God, and 
intimates that the God was a liar. Then, again, this God up- 
braids Adam and Eve, and curses the serpent for doing what 
he had inspired him to do. The man in future was to earn his 
bread by the sweat of his brow — the woman caused sickness, 
pain and death to enter the world. As for the serpent, that 
was condemned to travel on his belly forever after : how else 
he could go, or did go, before this time we are not told ! All 
this happened from the inspiration of the serpent to allow it to 
talk, and this was the doing of the God of Moses — not Our 
God — a Hebrew God, who, from the Mosaic record itself, was 
in the clothing business, for he tells us that his God made 
coats for Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness. And he tells 
us that the coats were made of the skins of animals, but if that 
was so, then, surely, history is repeating itself in this respect, 
for these are the kind of coats that the ladies of the present 
age prefer. 

This God then drove them out of his garden, for they had 



WJ 



142 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED, 

been taking things too easy there, and no doubt his God found 
out that he could buy vegetables cheaper than they had been 
costing him by trusting to this lazy couple. After they left 
this Grod^s employment, Adam and Eve took up a section of 
Government Land and went to farming to earn their bread ; 
and Eve, as a result of having tasted the tree of Life, com- 
menced having children ; we are told of two only to commence 
with, Cain and Abel ; Seth was the third one, but he was not 
born until one hundred and thirty years after — which does not 
appear like being very fruitful. 

Cain killed Abel, for which crime he was cursed by his God, 
and when he complained that the sentence would be death to 
him, his God put a mark upon him so that any one meeting 
him would not kill him. This proves that there were other 
people in the world, namely, the children of God, who after- 
wards became heathen ; the Progeny of Adam were the Jews. 
Cain fled from the presence of the Lord and located in the 
Land of Nod, and he had a wife ; where she came from we are 
not told. She must have been his sister, for we feel sure no one 
else would have cohabited with an outcast and a murderer like 
him. 

As a further evidence that tliere were other people in the 
world than the progeny of Adam, Moses tells us in the Sixth 
chapter of Genesis, ^* And it came to pass when men began to 
multiply on the face of the Earth, and daughters were born 
unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, and 
that they were fair to look upon, they took themselves wives, 
of all which they choose ; and when the sons of God^ came 
unto the daughters of men, they bare children unto them, the 
same became mighty men, that were giants. ^^ This proves that 
the God of Moses was nothing more than humanity. 

Following the above passage, we read : '^ And the Lord said 
my spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is 
flesh/' This is further evidence that the God of Moses was a 
God of flesh, for he says of man, '^He also is flesh.'' 

Moses, we all know, was born and educated in the Land of 
Egypt, in all the arts and science of Egyptian idolatry, and was 
himself an idolator up to the age of forty years when he went 



MOSES AND THE FLOOD. 143 

to the Land of Midian and learned of the existence of the Great 
God there. He had a purpose in view, in this : the Great Al- 
mighty God was too far off for that purpose, and, beside this, 
he wanted a handy God that he could use and consult frequent- 
ly, and he, therefore, made a God of his own that would sub- 
serve his ambitious purposes ; for, knowing the low condition 
of the Jews in Egypt, he thought they would not know the 
difference. The Priests and the Levites also kept this theory 
up for ever after to subserve their own personal interests ; and 
the descendants of the heathen, as the Jews call them, like 
silly simpletons, have adopted the God of Moses as the Great 
God of all the Great Universe, who is God of all creation, and 
One who is unrevealed to man except by the bounty we enjoy 
every moment of our lives. 

We now come to the flood, in which the God of Moses is 
made to take a very conspicuous part. If there were wanted 
any further evidence to prove that the God of Moses was not 
the Great God, recent discoveries that have been made in the 
vicinity where the flood is supposed to have occurred will prove 
most conclusively that there was a local flood, and about this 
there can be no doubt ; that there was a man, something like 
Noah, who saved all his family and all his live stock in a big 
boat is also very probable, for recent discoveries, in excavating 
in one of those ancient cities that once existed, have brought to 
light slabs of stone with a full account of this flood, and this 
account was carved on these stones two hundred years before 
Moses was born. Moses learned all this when he was in the 
Land of Midian and copied it, making a great many additions 
to it and bringing his God as a useful factor into the account. 
These slabs are now in the British Museum, in London. They 
speak of different Gods that were worshipped in those days, 
but there is not one word about oiw God. Moses took advan- 
tage of this history so as to give prominence to his God : this 
was part of the work that occupied his spare time while in the 
Land of Midian. And there is one thing to be noticed, that 
the God of Moses was notorious for not keeping his word : he 
would say things, and sometimes swear to them, and either 
forget them, change his mind, or repent, and then back out. 



144 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

Just before the flood, the God of Moses said, My spirit will 
not always strive with man, for he is flesh also, yet his days 
shall be one hundred and twenty years ; but, notwithstanding 
this assertion, the people after the flood lived to the age of from 
two to four hundred years — that is, according to Moses. 

We now .come to that great imaginary individual called 
Abram. He flourished about four hundred years after the 
flood and lived to the age of one hundred and seventy-five 
years ; he was the trump card in the hand of Moses in his try- 
ing to instil into the minds of the savage Jews that they 
were descended from a long line of godly people, and here was 
the starting point of the real circumcised Jew. The Lord told 
Abram to get out of his country and go to the Land of Canaan, 
and when he got there the Lord said to him as follows : Now 
the Lord said unto Abram, ** I will bless thee and make thy 
name great, and thou shalt be a blessing : I will bless them 
that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee 
shall all the families of the Earth be blessed. '^ We all know 
what a Jewish blessing was, and has ever been ; besides, it 
was unnatural to curse people because they could not tolerate 
a set of thieves and cut-throats ! But the curses of this God 
never amounted to much, nor were his promises and blessings 
ever realized by the Jews, for in fifteen hundred years of their 
history in the Land of Canaan they were of very little account 
as a Nation, except only for a short time under David and 
Solomon ; all the rest of their history, before and after these 
two kings, they were a disorganized, unruly people ; they were 
just as the Ishmaelites are described : their hands were raised 
against every man, and every man^s hand was raised against 
them. 

Again the Lord said, *' I will make thy seed as the dust of 
the Earth, so that if any man can number the dust of the 
Earth, then shall thy seed be numbered.^' Now to show how 
vain and unreliable this God was, we call attention to the 
fact that Moses numbered the people and David did also, and 
when David was in the height of his power, which was five 
hundred years after this promise, they only numbered about 
eight million souls, and directly after this they went to the 



MORE MISTAKES OF MOSES. 145 

dogs and were of no account as a nation during all the balance 
of their history, which lasted more than one thousand years 
up to and after the birth of Christ. 

And here, again, we desire to call attention to tlie important 
fact that this God was the God of the Hebrews only, and not 
the Great God of the whole world, and as further evidence of 
this we quote the 18th verse of the fourteenth chapter of Gen- 
esis : '^ And Melchizedek, King of Salem, brought forth bread 
and wine : and he was the priest of the most high God, and he 
blessed Abram, and said blessed be Abram of the most high 
God, possessor of Heaven and Earth, and blessed be the most 
high God which has delivered thine enemies into thy hands. "" 
Here we see that, though these people were called *^ heathens '' 
by the Jews, they worshipped the Most High God, while the 
Jews only worshipped their own God. 

Here is another mistake that the Moses God made : he said 
unto Abram ^^Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stran- 
ger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them and they 
shall afflict them four hundred years.'' Now, we are told that 
the Jews were in Kgypt only two hundred and fifteen years, 
and there were only three generations of their genealogy born 
there. In the same day the Lord made a covenant with 
Abram, saying, '' Unto thy seed have I given this Land, from 
the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates/' 
Now every Bible reader knows that they were living in the 
land of Canaan five hundred years before they succeeded in 
extending their border thus far and they only kept possession 
of the same for a short time under David and Solomon. 

When Abram was ninety and nine years of age, his God ap- 
peared unto him and made a long speech, telling him that he 
should be the father of many nations, and for that reason he 
changed his name, adding ^' ham " to it. He also gave him 
the Land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and he said, 
*' I will be their God." Here is another mistake, for they 
were conquered and taken away several times, and they wor- 
shipped other gods more than they did this God, and, finally, 
they have not been in possession for the last two thousand 
years. Then, again, this God told Abraham that his wife. 



146 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

Sarah, who was ninety years old, would bear a son who should 
be his heir ; and he also blessed Ishmael, who became one of 
the greatest reprobates on the face of the earth, and all his 
posterity were the same. 

Grenesis, chapter eighteenth, says : " And the Lord appeared 
unto Abraham in the plains of Mamre, as he sat in the tent 
door in the heat of the day, and he lifted up his eyes and 
looked and lo, three men stood by him, and when he saw them 
he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself 
toward the ground, and said. My Lord, if now I have found 
grace in thy sight pass not away I pray thee from thy servant: 
let a little water be fetched to wash your feet and rest your- 
selves under the tree, and I will fetch a morsel of bread and 
comfort ye your hearts, after that ye shall pass on, for therefore 
are ye come to thy servant, and they said So do as thou hast 
said/^ And Abraham hasted to the tent and told Sarah to 
make some good cakes, and then ran out and told one of the 
young men to kill a tender calf and dress it, and then got some 
butter and milk, and when all was ready, they had a fine re- 
past under the tree in picnic style. After these three men had 
satisfied their hunger, they said, " Where is thy wife V And 
he said, '^Behold, in the tent.^"* And he (Grod) said, ^*^I will 
certainly return unto thee according to the time of life, and lo, 
Sarah thy wife shall have a son.'' And when Sarah heard 
them, she laughed, and the Lord said, " Wherefore did Sarah 
laugh, is anything too hard for the Lord?'' And the men rose 
up from there and looked toward Sodom, and Abraham went 
with them to show them the way, and the Lord said, " Shall I 
hide anything from Abraham that I am about to do ? seeing 
that Abraham shall surely become a mighty nation and all the 
nations of the Earth shall be blessed in him ? for I know him, 
he shall command his children and his household after him, 
and th^y shall keep the way of the Lord. And the Lord said, 
^'Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because 
their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether 
they have done altogether according to the cry of it, which is 
come unto me ; and if not I will know it." The men turned 
their faces from thence and went toward Sodom, but Abraham 



MOSAIC ABSURDITIES. 147 

stood yet before tlie Lord. Tlie Lord then informed Abraham 
that if the people were as wicked as reported he would destroy 
both cities ; but Abraham pleaded with the Lord to spare them 
if there were any righteous among them, for Lot, his nephew, 
was there. The Lord said. If there were fifty good ones among 
them he would spare them, but as it was found that the only 
good ones were Lot and his family, they were taken out and 
the two cities were destroyed. 

This account has been rendered very nearly in full to show 
the great absurdity of it. In the first place, God and the two 
angels are called " men,'^ then we have the getting of water to 
wash their feet ; then the idea of God being fatigued, and the 
story of his sitting under a tree and eating, and then the idea 
of God taking offence because Sarah laughed when told that 
she would have a child at the age of ninety ; then the account 
of Abraham showing God th-e way to JSodom, and also of God 
telling Abraham all about his business because he said that 
Abraham was to become a great man, and he would command 
his household and they would serve the Lord for ever after 
and be a blessing to all the families of the earth ! And, then, 
to cap the whole business, the Lord told Abraham that they 
were a committee of three of which this God no doubt was the 
chairman, who came to see and inquire if all was true that 
they had heard about Sodom and Gomorrah ; then the idea of 
Abraham causing the Lord to change his mind and agree to 
spare the cities if there were ten righteous persons in them, 
and that God had come down from Heaven to see if these re- 
ports were true — all this is too absurd to palm off on any sens- 
ible or civilized community of the present day, and ought to be 
spewed out as nauseating trash unworthy of the respect of a 
common sense people. 

After the Lord had got all the evidence to be had from 
Abraham in regard to Sodom and Gomorrah, and that must 
have been conclusive, for the Lord sent the other two of the 
committee to perform the work of destruction, he returned 
to the place from which he came. Abraham journeyed from 
thence toward the South Country. 

And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister ; and 



148 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

Abimelech, the King of Gerar, sent and took Sarah for his 
harem (she being a young lass of only ninety years of age), but 
God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said unto him 
*' Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou 
hast taken, for she is a man's wife/' But Abimelech had not 
come near her, and he said " Lord, wilt thou slay also a right- 
eous nation ? Said he not to me, ^ She is my sister ? ' In the 
integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done 
this." And God said unto him in a dream, ^'Yes, I know 
that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart, for I also 
withheld thee from sinning against me, therefore suffered I 
thee not to touch her.'' Then Abimelech called Abraham and 
said, " What hast thou done unto us to bring this great sin 
that ought not to be done ? " Then Abimelech gave him great 
presents, and told him that the whole Country was at his dis- 
posal ! We have given a free quotation from this account, to 
show the absurdity of it. First, the idea of a king taking an 
old woman of ninety into his harem, and God taking this 
round-about way to protect her ; and again, the same thing 
happening twice — for it will be remembered that the same cir- 
cumstance took place in Egypt twenty years before when she 
was only seventy ; and further, the whole account goes to show 
that Abimelech and his people were a better people than the 
Jews were, although they were called heathens. (A circum- 
stance similar to the above occurred to Isaac, also.) 

Audit came to pass after these things that God did tempt 
Abraham, and said to him, *^Take now thy only son and offer 
him for a sacrifice." Abraham complied, and was about to 
Dlunge a knife into his son when his hand was stayed by the 
Lord, as he was satisfied with Abraham's faith ! Now, if this 
God was the God of the Jews only, this was all very well ; but 
if it is intended for the Great God of the Universe, then it is 
too absurd for common human nature : for the idea that the 
Great God would do anything of the kind is too ridiculous to 
be thought of ! It is hoped that our readers will peruse the 
whole account and analyze it for themselves. 



CHAPTER FIFTEEN. 

THE GOD OF MOSES AKALYZED — ContmuatioU. 

WE NOW come to Jacob, who was an especial favorite of 
the God of Moses. He was the father of the twelve so-called 
Patriarchs who went down to Egypt and were entirely lost 
sight of by the Lord, for they were a bad lot of sons for a man 
who was thought so much of by the Lord, notwithstanding his 
evil propensities : for Jacob cheated his brother out of his 
birth-right, and then lied to his old father — who was blind — 
and stole his brother's blessing. He had, then, to run away 
to escape his brother's vengeance. He went to his uncle Laban 
and, after twenty years' service, they were glad to get rid of 
him as he was absorbing all their wealth. It is a real wonder 
that God would associate with such a dishonest man, but such 
is the account that Moses gives us. 

We arrive, now, at that part of the writings of Moses that 
reveals part of his plot to make the Jews his subjects and to 
impose upon them a heavy tax to support his Court and the 
tribe of Levi. In Genesis, chapter twenty-eighth, verses 18th 
to 22nd, we read : " And Jacob rose up early in the morning 
and took the stone that he had put for his pillows and set it 
up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he 
called the name of that place Beth-el. . And Jacob vowed a 
vow, saying, if God will be with me, and will keep me in the 
way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to 
put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, 
then shall the Lord be my God : And this stone, which I have 
set up for a pillar, shall be God's house ; and of all that thou 
shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee." Now, 
just think of his generosity ! This was just like Jacob, the 
Jew : he says to his God, that of all the wealth bestowed upon 
(149) 



150 MOSAIC HISTOKY OF THE HEBEEWS ANALYZED. 

him he would return ten per cent, of it, but he says nothing 
about returning the principal. This is whore Moses shows his 
hand as to what he intended to do with the Jews when he got 
them out of Egypt, and to have this passage to point to as a 
precedent. But the queerest part of it is, how was he going to 
transmit the ten per cent, to Grod, as there were no priests or 
Levites then to take charge of the sum, nor were there any 
such until the time of Moses, which was three hundred years 
after this. And then, again, Jacob speaks as though he were 
poor, and going to seek his fortune, when the fact is, according 
to Moses' history, he was heir to a very large and rich estate, 
for Abraham was so prosperous and rich that he was envied by 
the princes of the country in which he lived, and, in fact, he 
was a prince himself and kept more than five hundred armed 
retainers. Isaac inherited all this wealth and was always very 
prosperous, and, having but the two sons, Esau and Jacob, 
Jacob was, therefore, very rich, independently of what he stole 
from Laban. 

We will continue further with the history of Jacob, to show 
how this man of God was imposed upon by Laban, his father- 
in-law, so as to create some sympathy in the present genera- 
tion for this much abused Jew. Laban, in the first instance, 
gave him his two daughters and their two maids for wives and 
concubines, by whom he had eleven sons and one daughter ; 
all of these were supported by Laban for his services. But, 
Jacob was not satisfied with this : he, like all Jews, wanted to 
accumulate wealth also. Some men are more lucky than 
others, and Jacob was one of the lucky ones. 

Everything had prospered under his hand for Laban, and 
he determined to have a share, Jacob said unto Laban, ^^Send 
me away that I may go into mine own country. '^ Laban said, 
^' I pray thee stay, for I have found by experience that the 
Lord is with thee : appoint me thy wages and I will pay thee/' 
And Jacob said Thou shalt not give me anything, but I will 
do this : I will pass through all thy flocks, removing all the 
speckled and spotted cattle and all the brown cattle from 
among the sheep and goats, and all such shall be mine, and all 
the rest shall be thine ; and Laban said, ''Behold, I would it 



JACOBUS CATTLE-RAISIKG PLOT. 151 

might be according to thy word/' Jacob, being an expert in 
the raising of cattle and sheep, arranged the matter so that his 
share was much larger than Laban's, and his cattle were all of 
the best, so that while Jacob was getting rich in cattle Labau 
was getting poor. But, the sons of Laban became dissatisfied 
with this state of things, and they showed their dissatisfaction. 
And the Lord said unto Jacob, "■ Return unto the land of thy 
fathers, and I will be with thee.''' So Jacob called a council 
with his wives and concubines and they consented to leave, for 
Jacob had told them that their father had deceived him by 
changing his wages ten times ; but, said Jacob, it was not me, 
but God who caused my prosperity, and has taken away your 
father's cattle and given them to me ; and this is how he ex- 
plained it : ^^ And the angel of God spake unto me in a dream, 
saying, Jacob ! and I said. Here am I. And he said. Lilt up 
thine eyes and see, all the rams which leap upon the cattle are 
ring-streaked and speckled, for I have seen all that Laban 
doeth unto thee. I am the God of Beth-el where thou anoint- 
edst the pillar, and where thou vowedst a vow unto me ; [to 
return ten per cent, of the accretion of wealth.] Now, arise, 
get thee out from this land, and return unto the land of thy 
kindred." And Leah and Rachel said. We are strangers to 
our father, for he hath sold us and devoured all our money, 
for the riches that God hath taken from our father, that is 
ours, and our children's. Then Jacob rose up, and set his 
wives upon camels, and he carried away all his cattle and all 
his goods which he had gotten. And he stole away in the 
night — like all thieves. For they were not satisfied with what 
they had, but they stole their father's gods of gold and gods of 
silver, and no doubt everything that was valuable and that 
they could lay their hands on. 

Now it is said that history repeats itself, and, truly, here is 
a case in point : for, according to Moses, this is just exactly 
what the Jews did when they were leaving Egypt, and this 
action of Jacob's was pointed to as a precedent, and it is so to 
this day. 

When Laban was told that Jacob had robbed him and ran 
away, he pursued him, and, notwithstanding that Jacob waa 



152 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS A]!5"ALYZED. 

hampered with all his family, his cattle and stuff, it took La- 
ban seven days to overtake him. Jacob (or rather Moses) tells 
us that the Lord appeared to Laban and told him not to hurt 
Jacob, and that was his protection. Now, it will be noticed 
that Laban was an idolater and did not worship the God of 
Jacob, therefore it is not likely that he would pay any atten- 
tion to what a God would say to him in a dream. But Moses 
says so, and who can contradict him ! 

A certain French lady who was about to be guillotined by 
the mob in France, for no crime, but for only differing from 
them, exclaimed, " ! Liberty : what crimes are perpetrated 
in thy name ! '^ This is quite applicable, here. 0, Moses ! 
0, Jews ! 0, Hebrews ! what rascality and crime you perpetrate 
in thy God's name ! 

And Jacob went on his way and the angels of God met him, 
and when Jacob saw them he said, That is God's host ! and 
notwithstanding he had his God's promise, and the angels to 
accompany him, his faith was not very strong in them, for he 
was very doubtful as to the treatment he would receive from 
his brother Esau, and he therefore selected some of his best 
cattle and sent them ahead as presents to his brother, to pro- 
pitiate him, for he expected some very rough treatment at his 
hands, for he felt that he deserved it. He divided his train 
into different companies and gave them orders that if one was 
attacked the others were to try to make their escape ; his God 
had promised his protection, but Jacob relied more on flesh 
and blood than he did on his God. 

Instead of the rough treatment he was looking for, his 
brother Esau received him in the most friendly manner, em- 
braced and offered every assistance in his power ; and we see, 
he was not a Jew, but the progenitor of the Edomites. When 
Jacob got a little further on his way, he met his God again and 
had a tussle with him. Jacob was having the best of it ; his 
God begged to be let go, as the day was breaking and he had 
to depart : but Jacob held on and said he'd be blessed if he 
would let him go : so his God was compelled to bless him, and 
baptized him with the name of Israel instead of Jacob. Now, 
it is to be hoped that he will be a better man with his new name 



*'WHAT TS HIS KAME?'' 153 

than he was under the old one I The famine compelled Israel 
and all his family to go to Egypt, but why they all stayed there 
and became a parcel of slaves, is the puzzle we cannot eluci- 
date, as the famine was to last only five years from that tinme. 
Israel seemed to hesitate about going, but Moses says that the 
Lord appeared to him and said, ^^ Jacob, Jacob \'' And here 
this God made another blunder, for he had changed his name 
and said that he should no more be called Jacob, but Israel 
should be his name ; and this God, on the very next occasion, 
calls him ^' Jacob/' And God spake unto Israel in the vision 
of the night and said, *' Jacob, Jacob/' And he said, '^ Here 
am I." And he said, "^^ I am God, the God of thy fathers, 
fear not to go down into Egypt, for I will be with thee, and 
make of thee a great nation ; I will go down with thee into 
Egypt, and I will surely bring thee up again." Now, notwith- 
standing this promise of his God, there is not any evidence 
that this God had any further communication with Jacob or 
any of his family or descendants at any time after their going 
into Egypt, or during all the period that they were in the land 
of Egypt ; and it is only when Moses makes his appearance on 
the stage of life that this God is re-introdused to public view. 
There is not the slightest evidence that the Jews in Egypt at 
any time during their sojourn there worshipped this God ; in 
fact, according to the conversation that Moses said he had with 
this God on Mount Sinai, when he was solicited by this God to 
go to Egjypt to deliver the children of Israel from bondage, 
Moses said to his God that the people would not believe him : 
they would say, " Who is God ? — what is his name ?" To any 
unprejudiced mind this would be conclusive evidence that they 
knew nothing of God, and had never heard of him. The Jews 
in Egypt were a god-forsaken set of savage slaves, and were 
never anything else ; and all the apology for a history of this 
people that Moses wrote was a trumped-up lot of stuff to sub- 
serve his personal interest. 

We will now go back to the Land of Midian and meet Moses 
and his God again. He says he led his father-in-law's flock 
back of the desert to the Mount of God, but the reader in his 
scanning of this account in the Bible, does not realize what it 



154 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

means. The distance from Midian to the Mount of God, as 
Moses calls it, is at least three hundred miles, and to get there 
he would have to go either through hostile nations, or a 
burning desert, where there was neither water nor grass for 
the cattle. He may have gone there with the cattle, but it must 
certainly have been his intention to keep the cattle for some 
emergency that might occur, but, from some change of plans, 
he returned to the land of Midian with the flocks and cattle. 
When Moses got to his '^ Mount of God,'^ he was eighty years 
old, and he there met his God for the first time. During all of 
those years, he was an ungodly, uncircumcised, idolater, ac- 
cording to his own account : for in the sixth chapter of Exodus, 
verse 30th, Moses says, ^'And Moses said before the Lord, 
Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh 
hearken unto me?'' And it becomes an interesting question 
to ask. If the Jews in Egypt were descendants of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob (who, it is claimed, were circumcised), why 
was not Moses circumcised ? He was nursed by his own 
mother and in his father's house. We repeat, again, that the 
Jews in Egypt had no more idea of the Great God than a 
hog has. 

When Moses went up on the mountain, he says that the 
angel of the Lord appeared in a burning bush, and when he 
was about to turn aside, he says, it was the Lord who called to 
him, and said, " 1 am the God of thy father, the God of Abra- 
ham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob," and intimates, 
the God of no others. And this God said, further, / am come 
down. What better evidence does any intelligent person want 
than this expression of this bogus God, who was ignorant of 
the formation of the world ? This is the same idea as that 
enunciated by Moses in his account of the creation of the world. 
He says that land was made to appear out of the water, and 
that on the second day God created a firmament above the 
earth, which divided heaven from the earth. Here was '^ up" 
and '^down," but in the present age we know that there is no 
such thing as up and down. 

God said, " Come, now, therefore, and I will send thee unto 
Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people, out of 



MOSES IN THE LAND OF MIDIAN. 155 

Egypt.'' And Moses said unto God, " Who am 1 that I should 
go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of 
Israel out of Egypt ? '' . And he said, *^ Certainly, I will be 
with thee, and this shall be a token unto thee : when thou 
hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God 
upon this mountain/' Here is another place in which Moses 
exposes his plans. He had made all necessary preparation for 
his ambitious expectations : he first brought his father-in-law's 
flock there for his commissary department, but finding that 
there were plenty of herds and flocks in the neighborhood that 
could be had for the taking, he returned them and determined 
to subsist on the enemy ; he also made a very costly represent- 
ative of his God, with which he intended to dazzle the savage 
Jews ; he also had a workshop on top of the mountain where 
he carved the Commandments on stone, but he was not a rapid 
workman, for it took him forty days to do what a man of the 
present day could do in a day or two. This delay caused him 
a great deal of trouble and the lives of three thousand of his 
people. 

Moses was in the Land of Midian forty years ; the Priest 
gave him one of his daughters for his wife, by whom he had 
two sons ; they were at least between thirty and forty years of 
age at the time he left for Egypt, and yet he speaks of them 
as though they were infants, for he says, he took his wife and 
two sons and put them on an ass and started for Egypt ; and 
the Lord said unto liim, '^ Say unto Pharaoh, Israel is my son, 
even my first-born.'' Here is another nut to crack : for what 
becomes of Abraham and Isaac, and all the rest of the genera- 
tions? ^^ And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the 
Lord .met him and sought to kill him." Now, here is still 
another and a harder nut to crack ! What did his God want 
to kill him for, after giving him such an important mission ? 
But perhaps the next verse will explain it. ^' Then Zipporah 
took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and 
cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou 
to me." So he (the Lord) let him go. Then Zipporah said, 
*' A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision." 
These two men — that is, Moses and his God — met at a tavern. 



156 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

and no doubt had several drinks, and then a quarrel arose be- 
tween them because Moses had not circumcised his two sons, 
and the wife, to make peace between them, performed the 
operation on the two sons, who were men grown. 

When we take into consideration the hard task a preacher 
has, and the study and worry he has to endure, to enable him 
to explain all these absurdities and improbabilities, we certainly 
ought not to begrudge them the salaries they get, for they are 
laborers, and laborers like them are surely worthy of their hire. 

'' And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to 
to you a God, and ye shall know that I am the Lord your Grod.^' 
And the Lord said to Moses, '' See, 1 have made thee a God to 
Pharaoh, and Aaron shall be thy prophet/^ Moses now ap- 
pears before Pharaoh with his magical rod, and there performs 
some of the tricks of legerdemain, but the necromancers of 
Egypt did the same ; and then he says he did many other 
wonderful things by bringing plagues on the Egyptians. And 
to show how much reliability there is in this account, we will 
give a specimen. The ninth chapter of Exodus, 3rd verse, 
says, '^ Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which 
is in the field ; upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the 
camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep. ^' The 6th verse 
says, " And the Lord did that thing on the morrow, and all 
the cattle of Egypt died.^' The 18th verse says, ''Behold, to- 
morrow about this time I will cause it to rain a very grievous 
hail, . . Send therefore now, and gather thy cattle, and all 
that thou hast in the field, the hail shall come down upon them 
and they shall die.'" The 25th verse says, ''And the hail 
smote throughout all the Land of Egypt all that was in the 
field, both man and beast. ^^ Chapter twelfth, verse 29th, says, 
"And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the 
first-born in the land of Egypt, and all the first-born of cattle.^' 
It will be perceived, here, that all the cattle and horses were 
killed three distinct times : first, by the disease of murrain, 
second, by hail, rain and fire, and third, all the first-born of 
human kind — with the cattle. And, as though this were not 
sufficient, they killed all of Pharaoh^s army of horses in the 
Eed Sea. Well, that was only the fourth time, for the horses ! 



( 



" BORROWTN^G.'' 157 

'^^riie preachers can, possibly, explain all this to their own sat- 
isfaction, if not to the people's. This is what they are paid 
for, anyway. But, herein we see the kind of divinity held out 
to us by these so-called people of God. 

'^ And the children of Israel did according to the words of 
Moses : and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, 
and jewels of gold, and raiment. And the Lord gave the people 
favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent them such 
things as they required : and they spoiled the Egyptians. And 
the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, 
about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, besides 
children. And a mixed multitude went up also with them ; 
and flocks and herds, even very much cattle. '' Now it is not 
likely that the Egyptians would lend their jewels and raiment 
to a parcel of abject slaves, who mostly wore nothing but a 
breech cloth about their loins, and who were treated by them 
with contempt: therefore, the ^'^ spoiling" of the Egyptians 
probably indicated the plundering of them. 

Moses says that they journeyed from Rameses to Succoth on 
the first day ; Rameses is a city on the river Nile, and the dis- 
tance from there to Succoth is only eighteen miles. The idea 
of about four million people with all their flocks and herds and 
all their household goods marching eighteen miles and camp- 
ing at Succoth is one of those great absurdities that Moses and 
his Grod are famous for ; for any one of common sense knows 
that there was not standing-room for them between these two 
points, and, in fact, there was not room for them in the whole 
land of Groshen. According to the history of Moses, this land 
Avas given to Jacob and his family, which only consisted of 
seventy-two souls with their herds and flocks. The whole dis- 
tance from the river Nile to the Red Sea is only about eighty 
miles. The second day's journey, he tells us, they made about 
sixty miles, to Etham. We know this to be another statement 
of the Munchausen type : for, encumbered as they were with 
women and children, the aged and infirm, and all their cattle, 
they could not make one half of the distance. 

We now come to that wonderful achievement performed by 
Moses and his Grod that should, and did, immortalize them 



158 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALYZED. 

until the present age, when the people are becoming inquisitive 
and in the mind to examine into the truthfulness of these ac- 
counts : we refer to the crossing of the Red Sea. Moses says 
that the Lord caused the waters to part in the middle so as to 
form a road of dry land with a wall of water on each side ; and 
he further says that the children of Israel all crossed over the 
Red Sea in one night. Now, any one of common perception 
must know that this is as great a falsehood as was ever written 
by man. Moses does not claim this as a miracle performed by 
his God, but just an ordinary matter — his Grod was there, how- 
ever, superintending affairs. If he had said that they were 
lifted up in a body and spirited across by the might of his God, 
we should have to accept it as a miracle ; but when he tells us 
that they marched across, we know that it is not true. 

He says that there were six hundred thousand men between 
the ages of twenty and fifty ; these would represent a popula- 
tion of about four million souls ; and then, all the flocks and 
herds, of which Moses says they had very much, and all their 
household goods and the trains of wagons to haul the stuffs, 
the infirm, and the children and all the rest, would make a 
train at least two hundred miles long ; and, with all these in- 
cumbrances, they could not make more than twenty miles in a 
day : it would, therefore, take them at least ten days to pass 
any given point, and Moses says they all crossed over in one 
night ! But the most important part of the misrepresentation 
is the fact that they did not cross over the body of the Red Sea. 
From surveys made by the governments of England and France 
by the most competent engineers that those countries could 
furnish, they not only surveyed Egypt and Palestine, but traced 
the route taken by the Israelites all around the Desert, when 
they left Egypt, and from their surveys and the plats published 
two important facts are proved, that contradict the account as 
it is given by Moses. In the first place, this plat, a copy of 
which is in our possession, shows the Red Sea to be something 
in the shape of a pear, with a stem at its westernmost end, and 
the route taken by the Jews is across this stem which was not 
more than a half mile wide, while the sea, about the middle of 
it, is from thirty to forty miles wide. At this crossing-place, 



THE JEWS WERE PLUNDERING AND MURDERING. 159 

the water was very shallow, and it is supposed to have been a 
causeway for a long time before, and there is no doubt that 
Moses crossed over at ebb tide and the Egyptians tried to cross 
this temporary way at flood tide and met with some disaster 
which has been greatly exaggerated by Moses, as he did every- 
thing else when it suited his purpose so to do. 

The next fact this plat proves is that the Israelites were not 
in the Desert as represented by Moses, but were in a fair and 
good country all around the Desert, murdering and plundering 
the inhabitants. Moses represents himself as only second in 
command : his God is therefore the responsible party for all 
the doings of the so-called children of Israel. Anyone who is 
capable and who will critically examine their doings after leav- 
ing Egypt, must come to the conclusion that they were more 
like hell-born demons than a godly people. On their leaving 
Egypt they followed the shore of the Eed Sea in a southerly 
direction for about four hundred miles ; this was all a good 
country, to Mount Sinai, where Moses kept them for about 
two years, trying to bring them under the control of himself 
and the tribe of Levi and the Priests, but his ejfforts all proved 
a failure ; for the Jews dispossessed Moses of the command 
and rebelled against his God ; they disavowed both, and ap- 
pointed Joshua as their leader ; they then started on their own 
account on a tour around the Desert, plundering and murder- 
ing the inhabitants. Their God had set them a bad example 
in telling them to plunder the Egyptians, and they, like wolves 
and hyenas, had tasted blood and plunder and wanted more, 
— and under Joshua they got it, but of this they are entirely 
silent. From the time they left Mount Sinai, for thirty-eight 
years, there is an ominous blank in the record concerning the 
doings of these Jews. Moses was a prisoner among them, 
their God had vanished, the en(,'hanting rod had lost its power, 
and the savage Jew was running his plundering game by him- 
self. 

When they left the Mount they took a northeasterly course 
through the Desert of Paran for about two hundred and thirty 
miles, to that part of the Land of Canaan which was afterward 
occupied by che tribe of Judah ; they continued their route to 



160 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

the Mediterranean Sea, and then along the shore of this sea 
to near what is now the Isthmus of Suez ; there they took a 
bee-line for their first starting place ; when they got here, we 
find no mention whatever of God or of the Egyptians ; there 
was no necessity for a God to protect them now ; the waters 
of the Red Sea were placid now and the Jewish horde passed it 
without noticing anything — they did not stop even to hunt up 
a few relics of Pharaoh's disaster, but continued on their old 
route along the shore of the Ked Sea to the Gulf of Arabia, 
and from there they crossed over the desert for the second 
time, to the Land of Edom. 

And now, as they have parted from their God, or their God 
has forsaken them, we will conclude this article by remarking, 
that there is no doubt that some persons will charge the writer 
with making sacrilegious references, and that if so, we will 
throw the charge back with contempt ; and we disavow any 
such intention. We want simply to show that these bad people 
used the name of our Great Creator to subserve their own sin- 
ful purposes. Moses was a fraud trying to accomplish a very 
ambitious purpose in which he failed ; the Priests and the Le- 
yites kept up this theory so as to keep in power ; and the most 
of the writings attributed to Moses were written after his time. 



CHAPTER SIXTEEN. 

THE GOD OF MOSES ANALYZED — Conclusion. 

UPOISr REFLECTIOISr, since writing some of the former 
observations touching the God of Moses, it has occurred to the 
writer that some of the strictures which have been applied to 
Moses personally should be, if not entirely transferred to other 
shoulders, at least equally shared by them ; for with regard to 
the introduction of God to the Jews as the God of the Hebrews 
and not the Universal God, we have to consider whether it has 
not been rather with those who came after Moses and stole his 
thunder, and made his God their God, upon whom the fullest 
condemnation should be visited : for, surely, such a God as 
Moses gives us should require a grievous distortion of the hu- 
man intellect before he could possibly be looked upon as the 
great God of the Universe, the Creator of this world and all 
its surroundings ! 

We say, then, that Moses and the Jews were idolators, and 
that the Jews must be such at the present time if the writings 
of Moses be still their guide ; and, certainly, as such, they had 
and they have still a perfect right to an idol to worship, none 
daring to molest them. 

Let us return now, mentally, to the Mount of God (as Moses 
termed it), and demonstrate this God of Moses to be nothing 
more than an idol, made by him to impose upon the slaves he 
was about to liberate from their servitude in Egypt. He had 
made a great many previous arrangements for this great event, 
not only in Midian, and in Egypt by his emissaries, but more 
particularly on Mount Sinai ; he had there made great prepar- 
ations in manufacturing a God made of gold and silver and 
precious stones : this he exhibited to the seventy Elders, but 
he took good care to keep them at a distance : he told them 
L (161) 



162 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREVVS ANALYZED. 

that if they came near they would be killed, but the Jews, not- 
withstanding they were ignorant in many things, were sharp 
enough to see through this humbuggery, as their conduct a 
short time after clearly proves, when they made another God 
in the shape of a calf, and worshipped in their old way ; all 
they wanted was liberty and not a new God. They objected 
to the God of Moses for the reason that with this God they had 
to take a King also, and with this King a very expensive Court 
which had a guard of about twenty thousand men who were 
called Levites. Had it been a cheap God that Moses recom- 
mended, there would have been no objection ; for any God 
would have suited them as long as it did not take from them 
their liberty and their wealth that they expected to gain by 
murder and robbery. 

We will now quote from the writings of Moses and show what 
kind of a God this was. Here is the apme of the plans of 
Moses to prove to the Jews that they had a God, who was the 
God of their fathers, and that now Moses was his prophet. In 
Exodus, chapter twenty-fourth, verses 9th to 11th, we read as 
follows : '' Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, 
and seventy of the Elders of Israel. And they saw the God of 
Israel : and there was under his feet as it were a paved work 
of a sapphire-stone, and as it were the body of Heaven in his 
clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he 
laid not his hand ; also they saw God, and did eat and drink. ^^ 
— in picnic style. Here was a show gotten up by Moses at 
great expense to confound (as he thought) the ignorant Jews 
with the brilliancy of their God. No one dared to approach 
this God but Moses and Aaron : he was no doubt fixed up in 
a dark grotto to make him appear more refulgent ; but he was 
entirely unlike the God who came to consult Abraham in re- 
gard to Sodom and Gomorrah ! That God was apparently a 
God of flesh, for he had his feet washed, and ate sweet cakes 
and meat, and drank milk, all in picnic style under a tree. 
And then again, this same God, according to Moses, met Jacob 
and had a wrestling match with him and came off second best ; 
then again this same God met Moses on his way to Egypt and 
tried to kill him — bat all these Gods were Gods of flesh, while 



THE GOD OF MOSES. 163 

the God on Mount Sinai was a God of jewels, one that could 
neither speak nor eat, nor would he venture even to lay his 
hands upon these newly-made *^ nobles, '^ who were dressed up 
with a breech cloth, wooden sandals, and nothing more. The 
history of the people who are called Jews, and who no doubt 
descended from no particular stock but were a mixed people 
taken to Egypt and sold as slaves — just as Joseph is said to 
have been, and as the negro slaves were brought to this country 
from the same land that the so-called Jews came from, namely 
Africa — can only date from their exodus from the Land of 
Egypt, with any probability of truth ; all the former history is 
pure fiction, gotten up by Moses to serve his purpose and grat- 
ify his ambition. Many of them may have been captured in 
battle, and these were the brick-makers, as they were govern- 
ment slaves, and no doubt the most of them were brought from 
Upper Egypt and Abyssinia. If this is correct, they do not 
belong to the white or Caucasian portion of the human family, 
but to a mixed race of Ethiopian and Egyptian blood. After 
they left Egypt they were in the habit of procuring all the 
white females that could be had, and in this manner they 
washed themselves to a lighter color. 

It is a very frequent occurrence for a Jew to marry a Cauca- 
sian, but seldom does a Caucasian marry a Jewess. In this 
way, in the past three or four thousand years, a great change 
has been made in their appearance, although one thing is cer- 
tain, that they originally came from Africa, be their color what 
it may. 

We hope that we have been able to demonstrate conclusively 
that the God of Moses was a weak and vacillating God ; and 
we know from our worldly experience that oicr God, the great 
Creator, is neither weak nor vacillating ; therefore the Hebrews 
may own their God all to themselves, and we will continue to 
look to our great Creator, who was never revealed to man on 
Earth, as our God. 

We can go through all the Jewish history from Moses to Da- 
vid, and show definitively that this God of the Hebrews was an 
earthly God, a God that did a great many foolish things, and 
was famous for making promises that were not fulfilled ; and 



164 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

as an evidence of this we will give a quotation from the First 
Book of Chronicles^ chapter seventeenth, verses 3, 4, 11, 12, 
13 and 14. (David, who had been very prosperous in all his 
worldly affairs, had built himself a house of cedar ; after this, 
he realized that his God was dwelling in a house of rags, and 
he therefore proposed to build his God a house like his own, 
but his God felt slighted by not having been first thought of ; 
he, therefore, sent the following message to David.) 

"And it came to pass the same night, that the word of God 
came to Nathan, [the prophet] saying. Go and tell David my 
servant. Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me an 
house to dwell in ; 

*^And it shall come to pass, when thy days be expired, that 
thou must go to be with thy fathers, that I will raise up thy 
seed after thee, which shall be of thy sons ; and I will establish 
his kingdom. He shall build me an house, and I will estab- 
lish his throne for ever. 1 will be his father, and he shall be 
my son ; and I will not take my mercy away from him, as I 
took it from him that was before thee : But I will settle him in 
my house and in my kingdom for ever : and his throne shall 
be established for evermore.'' 

The reader's attention is called to the fact that there is not 
one word of truth in all that this God said in regard to Solomon 
and his successor, for Solomon became an idiotic sinner, and 
left this God and worshipped other idols ; he reigned about 
forty years, and after him the kingdom was wrested from his 
son by the withdrawal of the ten tribes. This is not an isolated 
passage, for many more of a similar nature could be given. 

When we complain about certain passages in the Old Testa- 
ment the unreliability of which we can clearly show, we are at 
once met with the teachers' argument that All things are pos- 
sible with God ! This is all the explanation that is vouchsafed 
to us, for the teachers are just as much puzzled with these pas- 
sages of Scripture as the laity are, therefore they do the best 
they know how. We are not finding fault with them for not 
knowing, but we object to their pretending to teach things 
that they do not know : for instance, Moses says that God 
made the whole world, and all the animals and trees, and also 



THE teachers' argumekt. 165 

heaven, the Sun, Moon, and all the stars, and that this was 
done in six days, Now we know that everything is possible 
with the Almighty, but we do not believe one word of what 
Moses says about the matter, for, according to his theory, God 
was homeless previous to the Creation, and He was living in 
the dark, and also previous to this time there was no existence 
of any created thing whatever. 

Now, on the other hand, we think that it can very safely be 
asserted that GOD, the Great Creator, always existed ; there 
was no ''commencement" with our God. In regard to the 
God of the Hebrews, that is altogether another matter ; but 
our teachers mix the two, and have very foolishly adopted this 
G-od as their own : for was there not something tangible about 
this Hebrew God ? Could they not read about him, and make 
themselves acquainted with this God, and appeal to him for 
favors ? And, from the evidence of Moses, he was certainly a 
very handy God, and assuredly had a great many wives and a 
good many sons and daughters who were not above contracting 
an alliance with the daughters of men. 

It is evident that this God was no aristocrat, or he would 
not have allowed his sons to come down and to marry the 
daughters of men ! But, according to Moses, we must conclude 
that this God made a mistake in his creation and made the 
people too small ; he therefore sent his sons down upon the 
earth to change the breed, for Moses says that when the sons 
of God came unto the daughters of men they bare giants, who 
became mighty men of valor. 

Again, Moses tells us that men lived nearly a thousand years. 
Well, if those men that came down were sons of God, the great 
wonder is that they died at all. If these sons were mortal, 
must not their father liave been mortal also? 

The Jews are now virtually dead as a nation, and their God 
can have no more living reality in his being than his people. 
Moses further tells us that his God caused the whole world to 
be submerged, and, as we suppose that space is illimitable, we 
want to know what became of all the water ! But they say^ 
Everything is possible with God. Yes, so it is with our God, 
but this Hebrew God was a fraud, and the majority of the 



166 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALYZED. 

teachers know it, but they have not the courage to say so. 

Again, Moses tells us that old Noah got drunk, and his son 
Ham, seeing his father making such a fool of himself, laughed 
at him ; and for this very proper rebuke — for any man ought 
to be laughed at if he gets drunk — for this trifling levity he 
was cursed by his father and became a Negro. We do not be- 
lieve this, however ; for to change a Caucasian to a Negro 
would require almighty power, and we know that an old drun- 
kard was never gifted with that. 

Moses tells us in another part of his writings that a son 
shall not be held responsible for the sins of his father, and yet 
in the above-mentioned case Ham was the offender, but his 
grandson Canaan was the sufferer. Old Noah had not sobered 
up — and made the mistake of cursing the son instead of the 
father ! 

Again, Moses tells that when the sons of Shem became nu- 
merous they travelled over the country looking for a good loca- 
tion. They came to the plain of Shinar where there was plenty 
of clay, and they said to one another. Go to, let us make brick 
and build a tower that will reach up into heaven. And the 
Lord came clown and confounded their language. In the pre- 
vious chapter he divides the descendants of Noah and locates 
them in different parts of the world and gives each division a A 

language to itself. Nimrod, who was a descendant of Canaan, 
he locates in Babel, and yet, Moses tells us that the whole 
world was one language, when it was only Nimrod and his di- 
vision who inhabited the plains of Shinar : so this confounding 
of language could, after all, only have affected those who were 
building the tower, viz., Nimrod and his division, as all the 
others were already located and were enjoying their own sepa- 
rate tongues. 



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. 

THE LOST TENT TRIBES OF ISRAEL : — WERE THEY WHITE OR 

NEGROES ? 

THAT SO LARGE a number of the human family should 
tie their faith to the writings of Moses and also to the Jewish 
writings as being of Divine origin, is one of the wonders of the 
near Twentieth Century ; for, to the intelligent, searching and 
thinking student of the present day, they are nothing more than 
Jewish history, written in a very uncertain period, and by very 
uncertain authors. 

If it were not for the writings that are supposed to have been 
written in the Land of Midian by Moses, while he was waiting 
for events that he expected to come, there would scarcely be 
any evidence that Moses ever existed. When he returned to 
Egypt he was an old man, entirely too old and feeble to carry 
out the plans and to realize the expectations which he had 
formed ; therefore the greater part of the writings attributed to 
Moses must have been transmitted by the Priests and the Le- 
vites a long time after his day. But, be that as it may, any 
disinterested persons who would point out anything as possess- 
ing a Divine character in the whole of the Books of the Penta- 
teuch, would certainly not be amongst those who are jealous 
for the integrity and sacredness of genuine Christian principles. 

Moses is said to have lived to the great age of one hundred 
and twenty years ; he is also said to have been a man of power 
and position, highly educated and filling a large space in 
Egyptian history, for Josephus tells us that he commanded an 
army that conquered the whole nation of the Abyssinians, and 
that he married the Queen of that Country, and yet, with all 
this importance, we have not a word from him of his history 
(167) 



168 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

in all of forty years ; it was only wlien he had been expelled 
from the Court of Egypt that he makes his appearance among 
the Slaves of that Country, trying to foment a Rebellion. We 
have no history that ante-dates the Hebrew, nor have we any 
co-temporary, therefore we are at sea in regard to the events of 
those days, and this is what gives this Hebrew history such 
importance in the estimation of the human family ; our only 
recource is to do as is done by the lawyers of the present day 
when they have no witness on their side, that is, we must put 
Moses, or the writings imputed to him, on the stand and try 
what can be extracted from them. In the first place, concern- 
ing his personal history. He tells us that Pharaoh, finding 
that the slave population was becoming so numerous, issued 
orders to kill all the male children of the slaves in the whole 
Land of Egypt. This seems very improbable on the face of it, 
for, assuredly, the males were the most valuable in performing 
the work of the country ; and as the Hebrew slaves were poly- 
gamists of the worst sort, aud had as many wives as they could 
get, it would seem that the most effective way would have been 
to destroy the females. This would have checked procreation 
just as effectually: but, to show the unreliability of this ac- 
count, Moses tells us that, eighty 3'ears after this, he marched 
out of Egypt at the head of six hundred thousand men between 
the ages of twenty and fifty years. 

We will now go back in our examination of this said-to-be 
Divine character. He says that his mother, to save him from 
the fate that all the male children were suffering by the order 
of Pharaoh, put him into a frail basket made of rushes, and 
put it on the river Nile to meet its fate. This is, also, very 
improbable ; for a mother to send her infant to almost certain 
death ! He also treats us to that little romance about being 
rescued by the. Princess, who gave him to his own mother to be 
nursed, and who then adopted him as her son. Here is another 
improbability, that the daughter of the proud Pharaoh, and 
heir to the throne of Egypt, should adopt a slave child as her 
son. 

According to the number of slaves, as given by Moses, that 
were in Egypt at the tim« of his birtH, there must have been 



ABOUT THE TEN TRIBES. 169 

about four hundred thousand procreating females there, giving 
birth to about five hundred male children daily ; these were 
all killed, Moses only escaping ! 

There is a very interesting question to be considered in re- 
gard to the Hebrews who left Egypt under the leadership of 
Moses. There can be no doubt but there was a very large 
number of Negroes among them ; in fact, the probabilities are 
that the ten tribes were Negroes, and that the Jews that we 
have in the present day are the descendants of Judah and Ben- 
jamin. The reason why the ten tribes were lost to view is that 
they were made slaves of by their conquerors, and there being 
no affinity between them and the Judeans, they were never re- 
claimed. These ten tribes of Israel (as they are called) made 
themselves so obnoxious to the surrounding nations that they 
were themselves annihilated as a nation and the Samaritans 
put into their places so as to prevent their return. 

The trashy account of the twelve tribes being the progeny of 
Jacob is all a humbug, and the whole history of Abraham, 
Isaac and Jacob is a myth, the emanation of the fertile brain 
of Moses. If all these people were the descendants of Jacob 
there would have been more signs of a religious character to 
be found among them, but the first we hear of their God was 
when Moses met him on the Mount, but while in Egypt there 
is not a word of God or of Circumcision. The little evidence 
that he gives of himself is that he was not circumcised, not- 
withstanding that he was nursed by his own mother I 

The first thing we hear from Moses after leaving Egypt is 
that he is received as a son-in-law into the family of the Priest 
of Midian ; the next thing is that he led his father-in-law's 
flock back of the Desert. But the interesting question is, 
What father-in-law ? for he was then eighty years old and must 
have had several before the Midianite, and we have the account 
of several afterward. 

We will now go back to his early history. He says, that 
there went a man of the tribe of Levi and took a wife ; this 
man and woman were the father and mother of Moses, and 
the man, being very clannish, married his aunt — his father's 
own sister, — therefore the parents of Moses were related to him 



170 MOSAIC HISTORY O^ THE HEBREWS AN"ALYZED. 

in more ways than one. Moses seems to have been fond of 
females, for in giving what little history he does of himself we 
always find him surrounded by them. 

In the first place, he tells us that his mother, to save his life, 
sent him to almost sure destruction ; in the next place, his 
sister ran along the river to watch what became of him ; next, 
the maids of the Princess drew the ark ashore ; next, the Prin- 
cess gave him in charge of his own mother to be nursed, and 
then adopted him as her own son ; and then we hear nothing 
more for forty years — except inasmuch as he murders an 
Egyptian — until he appears among the Priest's daughters and 
protects them from the shepherds. 

The next information we have given us is that he led his 
father-in-law's flock back of the desert to the Mount of God. 
Very few readers have any idea what this means. It means 
that he took a herd of cattle and flocks of sheep a distance of 
nearly four hundred miles, mostly through a burning desert, 
to Mount Sinai. Now, the question arises, What did he take 
these flocks and herds there for ? Not for pasturage, but, in 
anticipation of certain future events, and this was his Commis- 
sary department. 

There can be no doubt but that Moses had been in corres- 
pondence with his family in Egypt for years, and for some un- 
explained reason their plans were delayed, but they were now 
coming to a head and the flocks and herds would be wanted to 
feed these people, but finding that there was an abundance of 
flocks and herds all over the country that could be had for the 
taking, he returned his father-in-law's flocks and herds, that 
perhaps he had borrowed for the occasion. Now, the time was 
consumed in taking the flocks and herds to the Mount of God, 
(and the reader will notice that this is the first time that his 
God is mentioned in all of his eighty years of life — up to this 
time he was a God-forsaken, uncircumcised heathen), and then 
his long palaver with his God, and no doubt Aaron and a large 
number of runaway slaves were also there to formulate and ac- 
complish these plans : all this took some time, and his going 
back to Midian to return the flocks and herds that he had bor- 
rowed (just on the same principle that the Hebrews afterwards 



THE PLAIN ENGLISH OF IT. 171 

borrowed the jewels from the Egyptians,) and his preparation 
to return to Egypt, a distance of eight hundred miles. Then 
there was his adventure with his God, who, he says, tried to 
kill him ; but it must have been a weak, impotent kind of a 
God who could not kill an old man of eighty, — or, perhaps, it 
was a god of metal that fell out of his baggage and hurt him ! 
Who knows ? Anyhow, he must have been delayed, for his 
wife, finding that fortune was not favoring them, came to the 
conclusion that it was because they had not circumcised their 
two children ; she, therefore, performed that operation on the 
infants, who must have been between thirty and forty years of 
age. All this may seem like trifling with a serious matter, but 
it is the plain English of this history said to have been written 
by Moses. When he got to Egypt he had a great deal of trou- 
ble to circumvent and overcome that stupid individual called 
Pharaoh ; this must have taken several months, and then his 
marching out of Egypt with about four millions of men, women 
and children, large herds and flocks, of which he says they had 
very much, *f or the Hebrews had a knack of borrowing, and no 
doubt borrowed a great deal of cattle, just as they did the jew- 
elry. When he got them all over the Red Sea, having no fear 
of the Egyptians, as he had killed all the horses in the Land 
of Egypt four times, they encamped on the shore of the Red 
Sea, where they must have stayed for some time, as Moses is- 
sued a great many orders and laws from there. And, then, 
again, he marched this unwieldy horde of savages to the Mount 
of his God ; there he also kept them a long time trying to over- 
come their ferocious savagery by exhibiting his God, all done 
up in jewels that he had borroAved from the Egyptians and 
others. He then hid himself for forty days on the top of the 
Mount while he was carving some laws for the guidance of the 
people ; but in trying to carry these slabs, which he had carved, 
down the mountain, he fell and broke them, and so had to set 
his God to work again to carve some more. All these particu- 
lars are given to show the impossibility of doing so much in so 
short a time ; for it is all the history that Moses gives of him- 
self, except the one day in which he was taken from the river, 
and the day ho killed the Egyptian and went out the day fol- 



172 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AKALYZED. 

lowing to kill some more — only three days of his life in forty 
years. Then, one day in the land of Midian, when he watered 
the flocks of the Priest of Midian, and we have all for the next 
forty years. All of his proceedings from the land of Midian 
to the Mount and then back to Midian, and then into Egypt, 
and the liberation of a nation from slavery, taking them to 
Mount Sinai and keeping them there for a long time, — all done 
inside of two years ! At this time, Joshua having taken his 
place, we hear nothing more from Moses that is reliable. In 
all the thirty-eight years that they claim to have been in the 
Desert, (but which has been proved to be untrue), neither he 
nor they give one word of its history. 

When the Hebrew herd of savage cut-throats emerged from 
what they called the Desert, Moses was still with them, but he 
was a prisoner of State, and they finally put him on top of 
Mount Pisgah and allowed him to die there like a dog, uncared 
for and entirely neglected; they did not look for his body, to 
give it decent burial ; his God and his people had alike deser- 
ted him, and, instead of being crowned with an imperial dia- 
dem, as he expected, he was not given even a pauper's grave. 
The Hebrews are said to have carried the bones of Joseph, the 
one who got them into slavery, back to Canaan, but Moses, 
who liberated them, they entirely ignored. 

The slave population of Egypt, who were the subjects of the 
exodus, was classed by Moses as consisting of twelye tribes ; 
how they got so designated we can only surmise, as there is no 
evidence that they were the progeny of Jacob. It is one of 
those fables which we can only put down as being of the class 
represented by Baron Munchauson, or Gulliver's travels. For, 
that the seventy-two souls who Moses tells us went down to 
Egypt, could multiply in two hundred and fifteen years to the 
enormous number of about four million souls, is one of those 
^' divine" things that the people of the present age are not in- 
clined to believe. 

Moses tells us that Jacob had twelve sons and one daughter. 
All of the sons lived to past middle age, for when Jacob went 
down into Egypt, Joseph, who was the youngest of the sons, 
had two sons of his own, and when Jacob died, seventeen years 



AVAS IT DIVINE PROVIDENCE ? 173 

after, they well still all living. If this story is true, there cer- 
tainly must have been a Divine providence in it, for, for a man 
to raise all of his sons to that age, is something unusual. But 
the whole story must be pure fiction, emanating from the fer- 
tile brain of Moses ; for had there been any Divine providence 
in the matter, Jacob and his sons would have shown some 
Divine inclination, whereas just the contrary is the fact. Ac- 
carding to this would-be divine account, Jacob was a thief and 
a fraud during the whole career that Moses gives him, and his 
sons were no better : ten of them sold their brother Joseph 
into slavery and lied to their father, telling him that Joseph 
had been devoured by wild beasts ; and all this precious lot 
of people are presented to us as Divine characters. The 
whole story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is fictitious only. 
Jacob may have been captured, and he and his family may have 
been made slaves, but that a large family like his, with Joseph 
as a protector, should go into voluntary slavery is just absurd. 
Now our present object is to endeavor to find out what these 
Egyptian slaves were. In the first place, the great probability 
is that ten of the so-called tribes were Negroes, the other 
two tribes were white, and the tribe of Levi was mixed. It 
is a well-known fact through history that almost all the labor 
of Egypt was done by slaves : and the question is. Where was 
the most likely country from which they could get their slaves ? 
From Asia, where the Land of Canaan is situated, and also 
the river Euphrates ; for it is said that the word Hebrew 
means '' People who came from beyond the Euphrates/' But 
the great probability is that the Egyptians got the most of 
their slaves from the Upper Nile, for the Egyptians were often 
at war with these people, and no doubt went to war for the 
sole purpose of capturing slaves. We are told by Josephus 
that Moses commanded an Egyptian army and conquered 
one of these countries ; and we read of one captive that he took 
— for the account says that, after capturing the country, he 
married the '^ Negro Queen of that Country.'' Now, on the 
other side of Egypt there is a large Desert, about four hundred 
miles wide, dividing Africa from Aaia, and as these people were 
the descendants of Ham it is likely that they got many slaves 



174 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

from this country also. Those who were styled as the tribes 
of Judah and Benjamin were the white portion of these people, 
but all the rest of the Egyptian slaves must have been Negroes 
from Abyssinia, Ethiopia and the Land of Canaan. 

Still another piece of evidence that there were Negroes 
among the Hebrews is that Moses, directly after leaving Egypt, 
took another Negro wife. The Jews of the present day are 
the descendants of the before-mentioned white tribes, for the 
other ten tribes were annihilated as a nation, and as tribes, by 
the Assyrians, who distributed them as slaves in their different 
countries, and put some of their own people in their places ; 
these foreign people being afterwards known as Samaritans — 
but of this we have written more fully in another place. 

We now wish to direct the particular attention of the reader 
to the tribe of Judah, as they were described by Moses. It 
will be seen that they were a different people from all the rest ; 
they seemed to be far superior to all the other tribes, and they 
also appeared to exercise all authority over the other tribes and 
concentrated to themselves all the power of the nation, not 
only in the beginning but to the last. The reason of this was 
that they were of the dominant color. The tribe of Benjamin 
and part of the tribe of Levi being the same, they got under 
the wings of their powerful brother, and be it noticed, further, 
that there was very little affinity between the tribe of Judah 
and the ten tribes, except it was to make them all come to Je- 
rusalem to worship and pay their taxes. All this goes to prove 
that the ten tribes were of an inferior sort of people. Further- 
more, Isaiah the Prophet, whose career commenced 760 years 
before Christ, and ended 698 B. C, a period of sixty-two years, 
in which time the ten tribes were carried away (B. C. 722), 
must have been an eye witness of the great catastrophe to the 
Jewish nation, but, notwithstanding this fact, he does not 
allude to it ; his whole theme seems' to have been Judah and 
Jerusalem. This is a further proof that there was no sympa- 
thetic feeling between these two Jewish nations. 

The Hebrews had hardly left Egypt when Moses commenced 
expounding the Laws that he had written in the Land of Mi- 
dian. Chiefly among these Laws was one establishing slavery. 



CONSULTIN^G THE ORACLES. 175 

and this was no doubt aimed at the inferior tribes. They saw 
this, and there is where the trouble originated between them 
and Moses, for when they pulled up stakes at Mount Sinai, 
Moses had no control of them whatever. They all, with Joshua 
for a leader, took a northeasterly course of about five hundred 
miles across the Desert and touched the Land of Judali. Now 
there seems to be a probability that the tribe of Judah remained 
there, for one fact is certain, that they not only got the lion's 
share in quantity of the Land of Canaan, but in quality also, 
and they let the ten tribes, who were the most brutish, go on 
their marauding tour around the Desert. 

To prove the pre-eminence of the tribe of Judah after the 
death of Joshua, when they became settled in this land, Phin- 
ehas, the high priest, consulted the oracles and promulgated 
the wishes of the Lord that the tribe of Judah should rule all 
the other tribes : and the authority for this is Josephus. 

When the son of Solomon succeeded to the throne, the ten 
tribes appealed to him to ameliorate their condition. He re- 
fused, saying, if they had met with hard usage from his father 
they would experience much rougher treatment from him ; if 
his father had chastised them with whips, they must expect 
that he would do it with scorpions. Now, how, and why, could 
people be talked to in this way if they were not an inferior 
class of beings, and more like slaves than brothers ? They 
were Negroes pure and simple, and nothing else. At this they 
rebelled, saying that they had no part in the sons of Jesse, and 
they made a king of their own. 

All through the history of the Jewish nation, a period of 
more than a thousand years, the ten tribes are scarcely noticed 
by the Prophets. One curious fact is that the Jewish Nation 
had run through their whole history before any of the histo- 
rians of the other nations wrote anything about them : the 
earliest one that we have any account of waa Oherilus, a cele- 
brated writer and poet, who flourished four hundred and eighty 
years before the birth of Christ, and at the same time that 
Xerxes invaded G-reece. In giving an account of the composi- 
tion of this army of Xerxes, which was composed of twenty- 
nine different nationalities, he uses the following language in 



176 xMOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AITALYZED. 

reference to the Jewish contingent : ''At last there passed over 
a people wonderful to behold, for they spake the Phoenician 
tongue with their mouths, they dwelt in the Solymean Moun- 
tains, near a broad lake, their heads were sooty ; they had 
round rasures on them ; their heads and faces were like nasty 
horse heads, also that had been hardened in the smoke/' Now 
these people must have recruited from the ten tribes who were 
then spread over all the Persian Empire. If this surmise is 
correct, they were the Negro descendants of the same. Tacitus, 
a celebrated Roman writer who lived in the commencement of 
the Christian Era, was the first to write about the Jewish na- 
tion. In giving the account of their leaving Egypt, he says 
that the most of them were Ethiopians. Here is evidence nearly 
two thousand years old. Tacitus further says that, while the 
East was under the dominion of the Syrians, and of the Medes 
and Persians, of all the slaves in these countries, the Jews were 
the most despicable : this must refer to the ten tribes, as they 
were spread over all those countries. 

When Moses promulgated the Laws of slavery, the ten tribes 
no doubt saw at once that they were to be subject to the whites 
and they became thoroughly dissatisfied, and could not be ap- 
peased untilJoshua, who was one of them, was made the leader. 
After this event, Moses was a mere cipher. 

The tribe of Levi must have been mixed, for the Levite who 
caused the great calamity to the tribe of Benjamin belonged to 
the tribe of Ephraim, and was no doubt a Negro. He took a 
concubine from the tribe of Judah, who was a lewd woman, but 
being a woman of good appearance she repented of her bargain 
and left him and returned to her father's house. When 
they were returning to the home of the Levite, the young men 
of the tribe of Benjamin, seeina: such a good-looking white 
woman in the company of a Negro, came to the conclusion that 
she was — just what she was — hence the result. 

It is generally conceded that the descendants of Ham were 
Negroes : this was brought about by the curse of Noah for the 
indecent conduct of this son : but why Moses located these 
people in Asia, on the shores of the Mediterranean, we leave to 
those to tell who are better informed than we. 



HEWERS OF WOOD A:N"D DRAWERS OF WATER. 177 

Abraham was a descendant of bihem, and Japheth is said to 
have peopled the " Isles of the Gentiles/' 

We here give an extract from the ninth chapter of Genesis 
as a further evidence that the ten tribes were descendants of 
Ham, and were fated to serve the descendants of Shem. 

^* And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark, were 
Shem, and Ham, and Japheth ; and Ham is the father of 
Canaan, 

*' And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his 
father and told his two brethren without. 

'* And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon 
both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the na- 
kedness of their father : . . And Noah awoke from his 
wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 

*^ And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants 
shall he be unto his brethren. And he said. Blessed be the 
Lord God of Shem ; and Canaan shall be his servant. 

^' God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents 
of Shem ; and Canaan shall be his servant. '^ 

All through the writings of Moses that he wrote in the Land 
of Midian, he seemed to shape them for events to come. 

Moses may have marched out of Egypt at the head of six 
hundred thousand men between the ages of twenty and sixty 
years, and, if so, the only descendants of Shem among them 
were the tribe of Judah ; Benjamin is doubtful, and the tribe 
of Levi was mixed. 

As an additional piece of evidence concerning this last tribe, 
we have two distinct accounts where Moses — who was at the 
head of them — took Negroes for wives or concubines. Now, 
taking these evidences into consideration, we must come to the 
conclusion that the ten tribes of the people called Hebrews 
were not only an inferior class of beings, but when they were 
in Egypt they were beasts of burden, hewers of wood and draw- 
ers of water ; without any knowledge of God, or any Divine 
worship. When they left Egypt, they were as wild beasts and 
brutes, and could not be restrained in their brutal treatment to 
all the inhabitants around the Desert ; for when they left the 
Mount they travelled through a thickly settled country for 

M 



178 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

nearly two thousand miles, murdering and robbing all the in- 
habitants, and yet these people, of whom the whole history of 
the whole world does not furnish their equal in cruelty and 
hellish doings, claim to be the people of God, and some of our 
people of the present age recognize their claim and bow down 
and bend the knee to these ungodly brutes. 

The ten tribes, who were called the children of Israel in con- 
tradistinction to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and who, 
after the days of David and Solomon, formed a nation of their 
own, had no moral ideas whatever ; all they thought incumbent 
upon them was to acknowledge their God and to pay their 
taxes — and this they did not do in one fourth of their whole 
history of more than seven hundred years, — and then they felt 
at liberty to commit all the sin that the human mind might 
devise ; they might plunder and steal as much as they pleased 
if they shared the plunder with the Priests and the Levites. 
They did not have the faintest idea of reward or punishment 
in the future, therefore there was no incentive to good deeds, 
nor fear of doing evil ones ; the only restraint that was put 
upon them was to keep away from strange women, and the 
reason of this was, that the Priests were afraid of this female 
influence, as some of the people of the surrounding nations 
were white, and the ten tribes being supposed to be negroes, 
the white wife was likely to draw her black man away from the 
worship of the Ark and neglect to pay their taxes. 

All of this purported Jewish history about Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob, and the twelve sons who were the progenitors of the 
twelve tribes, is a flimsy humbug gotten up by Moses to serve 
his personal interest. Up to the time of the return of the 
tribe of Judah from their bondage in Babylon, they had no 
continuous history ; all they possessed were fragments of 
anonymous writings, and during their captivity many of these 
scrolls were lost. Ezra, the Scribe who returned with them, 
appears to have been their only historian, notwithstanding 
they had been a nation for more than a thousand years ; and 
he, with his assistants, gathered up all these fragments and 
wrote what we have now as the Old Testament, for God and 
the Prophets had forsaken the Jews, and they needed some- 



I 



TOO MUCH KAITH. TOO LITTLE REASON". 179 

thing to keep them together. More than four hundred years 
after the time of Ezra these writings were further revised and 
corrected, and what we now have of Jewish Divine writings 
is nothing more than a lot of hodge-podge of a very uncertain 
character. 

The writings of those early days were very imperfect in their 
alphabetical characters ; each copyist had, therefore, to guess 
at a great deal, and they also, at times, injected their own 
ideas, and these writings having been so often re-written dur- 
ing this long period of time, by people who were under no re- 
straint, they have become entirely different to what they were 
in the beginning. Wich all this evidence before us, how an 
intelligent people (,'an characterize them as being of a Divine or 
sacred kind, is one of the great mysteries of the times. 

Ezra, the scribe, did more to perpetuate the Jewish history 
than any other man who ever lived, and how it was that they 
did not canonize him as a prophet is one of the riddles that is 
hard to solve ; and why the people of the last two thousand 
years should attach so much importance to the so-called " pro- 
phets ^^ is another mystery. Surely there is nothing in the 
style of writing to excite any admiration, for they are nothing 
more than a lot of unsatisfying predictions that never came to 
pass, and never will ; they are nothing but human thoughts 
that could only foretell what was going to happen in the near 
future, and we have thousands of men in the present day who 
can do that and perhaps much more. 

Now, the very serious question is, What are we going to do 
about it ? Our teachers insist that we shall continue to worship 
these God-forsaken writings — and what is the consequence ? 
"Why, that the people are falling away from. them. For, if we 
examine the religious statistics of the three largest cities of 
Europe, viz., London, Paris and Berlin, we find that not more 
than about three per cent, of the population attend Divine 
worship. And we have but to look right here, in one of the 
most conservative cities in any State in the Union, the fair 
City of Baltimore, and we shall find that not more than ten 
per cent, of the population attend Divine worship. Now, we 
ask again. Why is it ? Is it not because the teachers want to 



180 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS AN^ALYZED. 

instil too much faitli and too little reason to support that faith ? 
And they also tell the ninety per cent, that they must do as 
they do, aud think as they teach, or they will go to hell and be 
damned ; and if this is so, who will be responsible for this holo- 
caust ? Why, those who are preaching from the antiquated, 
unreliable and unreasonable Jewish writings that have no more 
Divinity in them than there is in a dime novel. 

It seems, then, to be an incontrovertible fact, according to 
Jewish history, that the descendants of Ham were Negroes : 
and the curse of Noah upon his grandson Canaan seems to have 
brought about this result. 

In confirmation of the fact that the desceiidants of Ham oc- 
cupied the land of Canaan previous to the exodus, we quote 
Genesis, the tenth chapter, 15th verse, which says " And Ca- 
naan begot Sidon, his first-born.^' Verse 19th says, ^*And 
the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest 
to Gerar, unto Gaza ; as thou goest unto Sodom and Gomorrah, 
and Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.^' From this evi- 
dence it certainly appears that the Canaanites were Negroes. 
Abraham was said to have come from '^beyond the Euphrates'' 
and that he was the progenitor of the tribe of Judah. 

Again we read that Abraham called his chief servant and 
made him swear that he would not permit his son Isaac to take 
a wife from the people among whom they dwelt ; and there 
must have been some grave reason for this request. l?ebecca, 
the wife of Isaac, also objected to Jacob taking a wife from 
these same people. Esau, who had been wronged by his mother 
and brother, to vex them took all of his wives from among these 
people. Dinah, the only daughter mentioned, was demanded 
in marriage by a Prince of this country and he was refused. 

There is no other conclusion to be deriv6dfrom all the mass 
of evidence adduced than that the Canaanites were a vastly in- 
ferior people, and the striking fact remains that, at the time of 
the exodus, most of them were but returning to the country 
from which they were taken as slaves, and having to murder 
their own kindred for the spoils which offered, and when they 
got to Canaan they killed the virgins also, preferring those of 
a lighter color, with which they found themselves surrounded. 



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. 

BIBLICAL CRITICISM. — Fvom the New World. 

^aS BIBLICAL CKITICISM never to deny, but always 
to affirm ? If it sees itself about to destroy anything, must it 
stop ? If so, it differs essentially from all other critical in- 
quiry, and can afford no positive results whatever. We must 
either accept scientific criticism or reject it ; we may not accept 
whatever we like or cannot possibly escape, and denounce or 
weep over the rest. To deny any of its authenticated results 
is to deny the validity of the whole. A Bible critic is good or 
bad according to the soundness of his scholarship, and the 
honesty with which he uses it, not according to the result he 
reaches. To apply any other test is to rule Biblical criticism, 
once for all, out of the circle of the Sciences, and forego any 
of the help it renders in interpreting the Scriptures. 

^^The same judgment must be pronounced on the attempt 
made by the New Orthodoxy to open the Scriptures to modern 
investigation ; and yet assume that their place in the world's 
literature is altogether exceptional, and that some other than 
purely natural forces have been at work in producing them. 
If it is thought necessary, in order to retain the Christian name, 
to warn criticism off the field entirely, well and good ; only the 
Christian position becomes then, as the Catholic Church main- 
tains, a matter, not of reason but of unquestioning faith. 
Again, if infallibility has been investigated and disproved on 
purely critical grounds, why shall not the claims of inspiration 
be investigated in the same way ? In point of fact, it is quite 
too late to reserve any Biblical question as too sacred or too 
occult to be inquired into. Whether permitted or not, critical 
science once admitted into the sacred realm, will claim all these 
questions as its own ; and theology can do no wiser thing than 
(181) 



182 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBR^VS AKALYZED. 

to grant it, once for all, absolute right of investigation within 
its entire domain. 

^^ Another singular phase of the situation, is the apparent 
cordiality with which the results of Old Testament criticism 
are welcomed and the grave distrust shown toward the criticism 
of the New. 

'* That the Pentateuch in its present form was written many 
centuries after Moses ; that the whole priestly legislation, or, 
in other words, all that we hitherto considered characteristic 
of Judaism, belongs to the period after the exile, and was the 
very human product of Ezra and the Scribes ; that the mono- 
theistic conception of Deity is found only on the latest pages of 
the Hebrew Scriptures and grew out of a piimitive polytheistic 
faith — all this, if not yet fully accepted, is recognized as a le- 
gitimate result of historic research/' 

SELFISHNESS. 

For some wise providence in nature, God has created man 
intensely selfish ; we often wonder why it was so ordained, but 
conclude that this is a question that will never be solved by 
us, for only the great Creator knows. But we are satisfied 
that, at all events, it was lor some good purpose and for the 
benefit of mankind. 

The intelligence of the present age realizes that our great 
Creator never made a mistake, as Moses would have us believe. 

If we examine this question from our earthly standpoint we 
can easily understand that man without selfishness would lack 
energy ; and as energy and progress are twin brothers, they 
must go together, hand in hand for the advancement of all the 
affairs of life : therefore, the more selfish we are, the more 
successful we also are in all the affairs of this life. The teach- 
ers inculcate tlie doctrine that man is a free agent, and a res- 
ponsible being ; but such we think is not the fact, for man is 
just what God and nature made him, and they cannot change 
God's work, notwithstanding there are more than one hundred 
thousand teachers, in this country alone, at the present time, 
trying to do this. As an evidence of their impotency, they 
have made no perceptible change in the condition of the human 



TRYING TO CORRECT GOD'S WORKS ! 183 

family. In all their efforts, the theory they inculcate is that 
God made a mistake in the composition of man, and they are 
trying to correct this mistake. They take charge of what they 
call a sinner, who is just as nature made him, (why should we 
find fault with a pot for its unshapeliness ? — it is the potter 
who is to. blame), and try to change his predisposition, and 
when they think they have succeeded they feel like taking out 
a patent for their improvement ; they do not realize their utter 
insignificance in trying to improve upon God^s works. Just 
to illustrate this, we turn to the pages of Marriott's novel, his 
'^Midshipman Easy.'' The father of the midshipman is sup- 
posed to be a crank on a certain subject, which was, he imag- 
ined that he could change the character of a man by a certain 
process. He therefore had a machine made for that purpose, 
and then engaged the most notorious rogues he could find as 
house servants ; these were experimented with daily in com- 
pressing their heads so as to change the formation of the bumps 
which are described by phrenologists. These servants, who 
understood the situation, very willingly submitted to the pro- 
cess, as they were reaping a harvest of many good things, and 
pretended to be very good. When the midshipman returned 
from sea, he found his father's house was a den of thieves, all 
of whom he soon got rid of ! 

The father thought he was accomplishing a great work, and 
could not be convinced otherwise, for he had this very weak 
point in his character ; but he was not singular in this respect, 
for every man has his weak points and is cranky on some sub- 
jects, otherwise they may be fairminded, good, average men, 
and make good citizens and good church members ; but, that 
one or more weak points cannot be changed, for nature has 
planted it there, and it is there to stay, and while cultivation 
may restrain the individual, it does not take away the imper- 
fection ; therefore, all that the teachers can accomplish is to 
preach to a great variety of the human family, all different in 
thought and predisposition ; some few do not need their admo- 
nition, but the great majority become either cowards, hypo- 
crites or sycophants : the cowards are those who fear hell, the 
hypocrites are those who are trying to cheat God and steal 



184 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

their way into heaven, and the last are those who are not really 
bad but have not decision of character to do what is right. 
The really good man goes to church because it is a pleasure to 
him, and also to set a good example. Now the question arises, 
What are we to do to restrain the bad passions of the masses ? 
— for more than three-fourths of the whole population of the 
country do not go to church. The answer is, first, education, 
and then the advancement of all the different branches of 
knowledge, progress in the arts and sciences, and if these do 
not restrain, then we must fall back on the police, the station- 
house, the jail and penitentiary, and, finally, as a last resort, 
the gallows. 

Moses virtually told his God that he was a fool, and would 
bring ridicule upon himself if he did what he was contemplat- 
ing. His Grod realized that Moses was right, and he backed 
out. Now while our teachers are not so bold toward their God 
as Moses was, still their line of conduct indicates very similar 
sentiments. 

The Church has accomplished nothing in trying to undo 
what God and nature have established. All the Jewish writings 
(like our own) emanated from the Priests and the Levites, 
therefore they do not give all the facts in the case ; but what 
we do get from them goes to prove that they have very little 
control or influence over the people, as education is doing more 
for us than religion is doing. The Jews did not possess the 
advantage of education, therefore they were uncontrolable. 
The present generation is beginning to realize that they have 
intelligence enough to attend to all the alfairs of this life, with- 
out fear, favor, or promised reward. 

The present state of society is becoming more equalized ; 
there is not so much of that upper class that formerly ruled 
the people with a rod of iron. We are becoming self-support- 
ing and do not have to depend so much upon a certain class 
for information as to what we must do ; and, while the great 
majority are opposed to anarchism, still they feel like they 
want to be untrammelled by the few who have heretofore arro- 
gated to themselves all the controlling power, and also the 
knowledge of things Divine — that there is not a shadow of 



\ 



PEOPLE KOT TO BE DRIVEN". 185 

evidence to sustain except what they have themselves caused 
to be promulgated and handed down to the people as coming 
directly or indirectly from a Divine fountain-head. 

ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE. 

There is a common saying that ** It takes all kinds of people 
to make a world. ^^ It would be a very difficult task to subdi- 
vide the inhabitants of the world into kinds, for there are no 
two to be found who are just alike, though there is one general 
kind who may be noted — the devotional kind. There is, and 
always has been, a certain proportion of the inhabitants of the 
earth who, while they may differ in many minor respects, are 
a unit in this one — the desire to worship God, our great Crea- 
tor, or some other Grod. It has been so from the beginning, 
and is so yet. These people are the good element of the hu- 
man family. This element at the present time, here, in our 
country, numbers about one-tenth of the whole population, 
the other nine-tenths are divided into different classes and 
ideas ; while some of the nine-tenths would support and defend 
the one-tenth if necessary, they are lukewarm about the devo- 
tional matter. 

A large majority of the whole of the people are entirely in- 
different about divine worship, and it is a serious question and 
one that is worth consideration. Why this indifference ? We 
know that a very large proportion of the indifferents are of the 
sinful cla«s, and we also know that another large portion of the 
nine-tenths are a law-abiding class of good citizens, and are 
fully disposed to support any theory or practice that will benefit 
the human family, or that will appeal to the mind and con- 
science. To illustrate this matter — a Methodist Minister was 
arrested lately in the so-called Republic of Brazil, for having 
criticised one of their patron Saints. Now, in this real Eepub- 
lic of the United States of America, we can criticise any reli- 
gion or political theory, none daring to make us afraid. Still 
that same feeling exists among many of our devotional class : 
they want to make the people conform to their thoughts and 
keep them in subjection so as to compel them to pay tithes and 
dues to the church, but, instead of accomplishing the object of 



186 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

their desires, tliey .drive the masses from them, and, as we have 
said before, they can only influence the one-tenth, whereas, if 
they would preach a reasonable theory and allow the people 
freedom of thought, they could perhaps persuade a much larger 
percentage to sustain them and to attend Divine worship. The 
devotional class does not seem to realize tlSit in this free coun- 
try people may be persuaded, they cannot be driven. 

The European countries boast of their superior civilization 
in comparison with the people of this, our new and glorious 
Republic ; but we know that there is more intelligence and 
education here than in any European country, or any country 
in the world. We are educating the masses, and, with us, edu- 
cation, intelligence and information does not belong to any 
special class, but is universal ; with us, a mechanic may become 
the ruler of the country, and no one can truthfully say that 
our rulers are not equal to any other rulers in the whole world. 
But the misfortune is, that in every country in the world there 
is a class of people who are non -producers, and they wish to 
make the producing class support them. This is not only the 
case in religion but in politics : the people are willing to some 
extent that it may be so, but they do not want to be imposed 
upon. 

The educated man has the same capacity for judging as to 
the reasonableness or the unreasonableness of the theories that 
are presented to him, as these would-be exclusive classes have. 
Just, for instance, take Cardinal Gibbons, who is supposed to 
be the greatest luminary in our midst, and strip him of all his 
sacerdotal vestures, and, as a disrobed man, what more is 
he than any other man of the same attainments ? — what pre- 
eminence can he claim over any other of his fellow men ? Just 
put his vestures on any other man who has the same virtue 
and capacity to fill his office — and there are thousands of them 
in our midst — and he is his equal in every respect ; and so it 
is with any other of these would-be teachers, they are only 
teachers for the ignorant, but to their peers in education they 
are nothing more than equals. These people try to surround 
themselves with a glamour of divinity so as to impress the 
people with the idea that they are chosen by some divine in flu- 



EQUALITY. 187 

ence, and want to be respected as such, but the only pre-emin- 
ence they possess are the clothes — just like the soldiers who at- 
tract attention by their gaudy uniform. 

One of the greatj^t men this country has ever produced wrote 
that '^ All men are born free and equal. '^ With all due defer- 
ence to his great talent, we say that he was wrong ; for, at that 
very time, there was a large portion of our population born in 
slavery, and they continued so for a long time afterward. But 
apart from that view of the subject, we say there is no equality 
in men. They may be equal in part, that is, from the neck 
down they are generally alike, but the head is where the differ- 
ence is to be found. 

There is a conundrum which runs thus : '^ What is it that a 
man sees every day, a king seldom sees, and God never sees ?'' 
— ^His equal. ^' Notwithstanding men see their equals every 
day, yet they are equal neither socially nor in worldly goods. 
Two men may be working together and getting the same pay, 
yet one may not consider the other his equal, for this one may 
be the better manager domestically, and keep his family more 
respectable and better educated. The well dressed man does 
not care to associate with the seedy loafer. An Italian prince 
was once told that his hands were not clean ; he looked at them 
and replied " You should see my toes V Even Democrats 
would not wish to dine with him or to have him for a bed-fel- 
low. The most difficult thing in this life is to draw the line 
of equality. Those whom you would acknowledge as your 
equals are very apt to think themselves away above you. The 
line will not even stand good from one day to another : — a 
man in New York, of good family and fine education, was re- 
duced to perform the work of the stable, sleeping and eating 
on the premises. Necessity is a pretty hard master. But, while 
so employed he received the news that a relative in England 
had died and left him a hundred thousand dollars ! Before 
this, his employer would not for a moment have thought of as- 
sociating with him as an equal, or of inviting him to his house ; 
but, after the money was secured, he took a step or two above 
his employer. A woman who was found fault with for living 



188 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

in a certain neigliborhood said : ^' People might be compelled 
to live in a stable, but it would n^t make horses of them ! '' 

A man in Virginia owned a large but poor farm : a young 
fellow who was paying his addresses to the farmer^s daughter 
stopped visiting her, concluding that she was too poor for him. 
A short time after this, oil was discovered on the farm, and the 
owner of course became very rich. The young man was now 
very anxious to resume his attentions to the daughter. She 
looked at him and said, " Dad's struck ile,^' and then turned 
her back to him. So it is all through life ; the line is like the 
line of the sun, changing every day ; and, after all, the only 
distinction is in the brain and the mighty dollar. 

Many men born in affluence become paupers, and others born 
in poverty jingle their dollars and laugh at lines of distinction. 
They may become distinguished by their talents, as we all are 
children of circumstances. As Widow Bedot says, '^-We are 
all poor weak critters \'' to-day we may be on top, but we do 
not know what to-morrow may bring foi th to change it all. 

Filmore and Johnson were tailors, but they both became 
Presidents of the United States. Tliere are many of the des- 
cendants of the other Presidents who are now laboring for their 
daily bread. We should therefore not be vain of our position 
in life when fortune favors us, or be overbearing to those who 
are placed under us, as we do not know how soon the positions 
may be reversed and we may need the same forbearance. As 
civilization and refinement advance, pride and deceitfulness 
follow. There are not so many distinctive classes among the 
uncivilized, as with them it is mostly only a question of some- 
thing to eat and a place to sleep ; and as they do not wear cuffs 
and collars aud fancy neck ties, there is more equality. Not- 
withstanding that mind rules matter the world over, it does 
not always succeed in attaining the position it deserves, for 
many a brilliantly gifted man has died in obscurity for the 
want of sheer opportunity ; and many a man of mediocre talent 
has been elevated to the highest honors. Then, again, a man 
shines out in one sphere and is very dull in others. A well- 
balanced mind and the opportunity being given, fame and for- 
tune may be expected. The best educated people in the world 



CALLING IT '^ BUSINESS." 189 

are the most treacherous and unreliable. As an illustration 
of this we refer to the diplomatists of the different nations in 
their intercourse with one another : they never say what they 
mean or mean what they say ; they are continually trying to 
hide their thoughts that they may gain some advantage. 

Emperors and kings, who claim the very apex of honor, are 
only great in one thing, and that is, how to secure their own 
selfish ends. The people of Holland have the reputation of 
being the most honest people in Europe. A merchant from 
there came to this country to see how we did business, and, 
when his opinion of us was asked, he said, " You are strange 
people ; you all try to cheat one another and call it business." 
To succeed in business a man is compelled to be selfish, as it 
is but human nature. The unselfish man is looked upon as a 
simpleton, and he goes through the world unappreciated be- 
cause unsuccessful. 

We often wonder why it is that people were not created better, 
as we think the world would be happier thereby ; but civiliza- 
tion, progress, and the arts and sciences would be retarded if 
it were not foi' selfishness. If we were all unsophisticated there 
would not be much enterprise in the world. 

WOKLDLINESS OF THE CHURCH. 

Churches are very good institutions to repress the evil pas- 
sions of the badly disposed part of the community, but they, 
like all otherworldly institutions, are carried on for the mighty 
dollar. 

There was a man whom the writer knew a long time ago, who 
drew a prize of ten thousand dollars in the lottery, and feeling 
some compunctions of conscience at getting this money in that 
way, he gave one half to the church, and they in return gave 
him a front pew in the church for life, A few years after, he 
became poor, and they then moved him down to the lower pews. 
He had given them an amount that would yield three hundred 
dollars per annum for ever, and they, the church, gave in re- 
turn what was worth only twenty dollars a year for a few years. 

France, previous to the Revolution of 1789, was ruled by the 
priests, the lawyers, and the noblemen : the masses of the 



19Q MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS ANALYZED. 

people were no better off than slaves. When a couple wanted 
to get married the lawyer had to be sent for first to draw the 
marriage contract, then the priest to bless the contract, and 
the nobleman — to show his superiority and power — inserted 
his leg between the bridal sheets before the couple were allowed 
to occupy the bed ! 

We are all created alike, and the flesh and blood of the child 
of a prince is no better than that of a peasant ; the only differ- 
ence is in health and the intellect. Nature has formed us al^ 
different to perform the different affairs in this life. Some are 
intended to rule and others to labor, and it is well that it is so, 
for the greater the civilization the more distinctive classes there 
must be. We are all intended to work for one another ; we 
all labor in our distinctive departments producing the different 
articles that go to make life comfortable. Some are in high 
places and others are in low places, but we should all be satis- 
fied with what nature designs us for. Those who are contented 
generally get along in life better than the discontented ones. 

THE AKARCHIST. 

Do not quarrel with nature for not having put you in a better 
position in the world, for if you have the ability you may im- 
prove your condition in life by industry and economy, and 
raise yourself to the desired position. A poor man^s child has 
the same chance in this country that the rich one iias. The 
great mistake is that we sometimes take to the wrong vocation . 
to insure success : a man who is fit only for labor should not 
aspire to a profession. It is better to be a successful laborer 
than an unsuccessful professional man. The poet says that 
*' Honor or shame from no condition rise ; act well your part, 
there all the honor lies.'' It takes all kinds of people to make 
up the world's complement, and it does not matter how low the 
office there is always some one found to fill it. On the other 
hand, in the higher department of life, we have to seek those 
who are capable of performing the duties entrusted to them. 

We should all try to better our condition in life, and if we 
have the capacity we can do so, and if we have not, we must be 
content with what we have. There is a class of people in the 



WEALTH FOR THE WORLD'S BEKEFIT. 191 

world called anarchists ; they belong to the dissatisfied class, 
and they want to abolish all law and order so as to be able to 
plunder those who have accumulated wealth by industry ; they 
are too lazy to earn their bread by the sweat of their own brow 
and seek to utilize the sweat of some one else for that purpose. 
If they had their way there would not be so many distinctive 
classes in the world — there would only be the robber and the 
victim, — just as it was with the Jews when they left Egypt : 
they were anarchists of the most pronounced type. 

We should not envy those who have accumulated wealth, 
for they are the ones who give employment to the masses ; and 
without employment we should be like the savages. One rich 
man sometimes gives support to thousands of men and families 
by building houses, ships, or railroads, and developing all 
kinds of industries. The rich man works harder than the la- 
borer, for he has all his large affairs to attend to, and for all 
this he gets only his victuals and clothes and a house to live 
in. If there were no rich men we should not have fine cities 
or good roads through the country to travel on, and we should 
just be in the condition of the aborigines of this country and 
live in holes and skin tents. 

One of the great mistakes in life some make is to accumu- 
late great wealth with no object in view. Wealth was intended 
for the benefit of mankind ; if, therefore, it be not judiciously 
used, the life of the rich will be a failure. 

A man died not long ago who, by depriving himself of all 
the comforts of life, had saved up one hundred thousand dol- 
lars. His last wish was that he could swallow all his money 
and take it with him I We should, therefore, enjoy life with 
moderation and thankfulness for all the blessings that have 
been bestowed upon us, and remember those who have not been 
so fortunate in their worldly affairs — for charity to our fellow- 
beings is next to godliness. 

There was a church in England that wanted to raise money 
for the poor. They invited the celebrated Dean Swift to preach 
a charity sermon, hoping by his eloquence to draw money 
from the congregation. He declined, saying that *' charity 
should be spontaneous. '^ They importuned him and he finally 



192 MOSAIC HISTORY OF THE HEBREWS Al'^'ALYZED. 

consented. When the day arrived, he took the text *^He that 
giveth unto the poor, lendeth unto the Lord/^ He looked all 
around at the people and then, shutting up the Bible, said, 
''All of you who are satisfied with this security, come up and 
pay your cash/' This was all the sermon he preached. 

If you have an abundance of God's wealth you are one of 
Grod's stewards. Our government has established mints to 
coin money for our convenience : the whole earth is God's 
Mint, and ever}/ foot of it is coining something for our comfort 
by the Almighty power ; therefore, do not be proud or vain if 
your portion has been bountiful. 

The rich man said, ^' Soul, take thine ease," but, the next 
day, was called away. Think also of the story of Nebuchad- 
nezzar, who, for his vanity, was said to have been made to eat 
grass for seven years to cure him of his pride ! 

The writer of these pages intended, in the first instance, to 
criticise the writings of the first five Books of the Old Testa- 
ment only, and to that end studied, particularly, those writ- 
ings ; but, since the commencement of this task, he has read 
and seen so much evidence to sustain his views not only in re- 
gard to the Old Testament, but, likewise, in regard to the 
New, as published in daily papers and periodicals, that he de- 
termined to pursue the subject onwards to the present day. 
There is really no necessity for him to study any further, as 
the thing is being done for him on every hand, and by better 
heads and more competent scholars ; and he intends, therefore, 
to take advantage of these labors and to quote somewhat freely 
from the sources which lie at his disposal ; and, with the ex- 
pressing of the intention which he hopes successfully to carry 
out, he concludes the First Part of this '^Mosaic History," 
and earnestly begs leave to request of the reader a candid 
perusal of the Second. 

END OF part first. 



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